


Pale Gamkar Month 2015

by cinderrain



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Accidental Stowaway, Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, Avoidance, Bad Puns, Bullying, Dream Bubbles, Drowning, Ghibli crossover, Ghosts, Goats, Insecurity, M/M, Memory Loss, Pale Gamkar Month 2015, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Puns & Word Play, Witchcraft, Zombies, Zombiestuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-01
Updated: 2015-04-30
Packaged: 2018-04-01 02:11:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 30
Words: 29,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4001920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cinderrain/pseuds/cinderrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Collection of fills for Pale Gamkar Month.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. First Pile

**Author's Note:**

> Official Tumblr here: http://palegamkarmonth.tumblr.com/  
> Cross-posted from: http://cinder229.tumblr.com/tagged/pale+gamkar+month

Your name is Karkat Vantas, and you are determined to be a good moirail. And being a good moirail sometimes means that you have to stay strong in unstable conditions for your unstable clown, and even though that doesn’t mean “ignore circumstances completely”, for the purposes of today you will pretend it does. (You are very good at that; pretending, for example, that you aren’t a hideous mutant deserving to be culled, or pretending you’re a competent leader, or pretending that your angry words actually have any effect at all.)

For today, you will pretend that there is fond mocking coming from all directions, as there would be if all was well and normal, voices going “You haven’t even had your first pile yet? Wow, disgraceful!” or “Time to put all those romcoms into practice, eh?” You will pretend to be disgruntled, reluctant, giving in to those voices, because all your friends who are still alive and near you are too busy with various emotional problems of their own. You will, in following their suggestions, gather up the necessary ingredients for a non-disaster First Pile: piling materials that aren’t fucking horns; your elusive, potentially-still-feeling-murderous moirail; yourself, slightly less falling-apart than usual; and a place where you won’t be disturbed by nosy humans or revenge-bent jadebloods with chainsaws. 

You will take a moment to compose yourself in the corner of a spare block, because unlike some of your friends, you don’t actually hear any voices and you don’t wish you do - you wish they were all alive and here and, well, while you’re wishing futilely, what you really want is to go back home. 

By the time you’ve gathered most of the things on your list, an hour has passed and you have no clue where Gamzee is. The last time you saw him was three days ago, because Kanaya has taken to pacing the hallways to avoid Rose, and he’s already flinchy enough as it is. You don’t want to wander the meteor looking for him, because you don’t want to bump into anyone else yourself. 

You sit on your mostly-pillow pile and wait. 

Another half-hour passes, and you discover through shifting impatiently that a spare horn managed to make its way in here anyway, and you are pretty much done with the entire endeavor when a honk echoes from somewhere down the hall. 

Footsteps, too. You peek out around the door frame and oh, shit, of course it has to be Kanaya. She’s the only one actively moving at any given time, so it’s only reasonable, but seeing her tense back heading in the same direction of the honk does not exactly bode well for you.   
She doesn’t open closed doors, though, so if you can somehow get Gamzee in here without her noticing - there’s a vent opening in the room, but how would he know to come this way…?

Aw, fuck. You sigh, turn and close the door, and rummage through the pile for that horn.

Honk.

You know from experience that following honks around on the meteor doesn’t get you anywhere, and Kanaya isn’t so eager to see Gamzee to potentially intrude on you or Terezi or either of the humans. And so it is that a few minutes later the footsteps are gone and a hesitant painted face emerges from the wall. 

“Hey, brother.” He starts off quiet, and unreadable, and nothing like the troll you knew who would message you every single night to tell you he’d nearly exploded himself again, or he’d found an interesting colour of shell, or some other bullshit you rarely tried to understand. “Are we all getting our motherfucking pale on at in this block? Up and proper-like,” he comments, noticing the pile.

“Yeah,” is all you say in response. He curls himself out into the open, arms tumbling over legs and horns and landing somehow neatly, sitting next to the pile. He looks at you. He looks at the pile. You notice the scars on his face all over again, and gulp when you remember who they’re from. His fingers are so underwhelming, though, claws gnawed to ragged ends and knuckles sticking out awkwardly, that you can’t quite bring yourself to reconcile them with the two corpses lying in some other block. 

“Yeah,” you repeat, and take him by the hand to pull him into the pile, and when he smiles at you through his clown-paint mask and you still can’t read him, you desperately hope you aren’t making some kind of mistake. 


	2. Horns

You lounge on your beach, within eyesight of your hive and a reasonable distance away from the sea, waiting this time for your palebrother and not your lusus. (Although you kind of are, still, because you’re always waiting for your dad.) It’s getting on to morning, and you know Karkat would take you to task for staying outside this close to sunrise, but you don’t want him to get stuck in daylight or lost or something, and you figure watching from out here is your best bet. The sand is rough under your palms, all little pieces of shell and rock sticking to your skin and poking in under your nails, and you tip your head back to watch the sky lighten.

“What the hell are you doing out here?” You tip back more, far enough your horn-tips are pointed down instead of up, and see Karkat getting his fuss on like you’d up and predicted. He goes on and rambles and pulls you up by the wrist, and you let him get you to your feet even though it doesn’t even really work when he’s littler than you, and then he brushes all the sand off you and fusses some more. You’re not really listening to his words, because you know, you know, but the rhythm of his speech and growly undertones catch you and hold you under. 

The two of you hurry back to your hive, to shelter from the sun. You switch from being led to leading him once you’re inside, tugging at his sleeve and getting the two of you to your entertainment block where you have a pile all set up. It’s not even completely bicycle horns, like it normally would be - you’ve included some of his things too, like movie cases. He mutters something about it being uncomfortably pokey, but you frown as you notice something you hadn’t before (you’d been too busy with seeing him again, hearing him talk). He’s doing his usual grumbly-talk, but he’s quieter than you’re used to and kind of nervous-picking at his fingers, the hem of his shirt, his lip - and everything he says is, even more than usual, the same repeated words he uses when he’s too distracted to think of new things to say. 

You give him a worried look all through the process of settling down on the pile, and when the honks have died down he finally turns to look you in the eye and snap an irritated “ _What_?”

“Something’s all up in your pan, bro, and getting at its bother on.” You watch as he wrinkles his nose a little at this, one hand subconsciously drifting up to cover one of his horns. You tilt your head so your own set are all wonky-slanted, and watch him harder. He catches a tooth in his lip, squeezes his hand tight around his horn like as he’s trying to hide it, and finally you’re uncomfortable enough with how uncomfortable he is to put your hand on his head over his. 

“Hey now,” you go as he makes to lean away, and you get your other arm around him to draw him in to you, his face to your symbol and your chin over his head. “What’s wrong, brother, what’s wrong?” You feel him shake his head a little, his hair shifting under your neck. You clutch him tighter and wait.

After a few moments he lifts his head up a little, off of your chest, takes a breath and stops. Starts again, and this time crackles out in a voice just a few decibels above a whisper. “Some fucking assholes made fun of my horns on the way here, it’s no big deal.” Let it drop, his voice says, but his claws catching on your shirt where he’s holding on say  _there’s more to it than that_. 

You wait more. 

He’s not the type to get bothered by some random strangers on the street, at least not on a good day, and he knows you know that. So he sighs into the expectant silence after a few more moments, and mumbles something indecipherable with his face buried in your shirt. 

“M'not all to be able to motherfucking hear you when what at your mouth-noises ain’t pointed my way,” you tell the top of his head. 

“… got me thinking, what if my mutation affected more than my blood, and if it’s gotten to my horns then what else is fucking wrong with me, maybe-”

You lift your other hand off his back and curl it over top of the horn he isn’t holding on to, and  _shhhshshh_ at him. “Nothing’s getting to be wrong with your blood or your horns, they’re both all being wicked-ass amazing. Nothing else to be wrong with you, either, ‘cepting what shit trolls all got in their selves all normal-like.” If  _he’s_ wrong then what would that make you? Not something good, that’s for sure, no matter what the schoolfeeds keep telling you about colours and blood. 

“Mmng,” he says to that and presses his face back where it was. You wrap yourself around him more snug, lean your back against the wall and get your legs settled under his legs on the pile. He’s going to be okay for now, you think, and that means you’ll be okay too. 


	3. Forgiving

You wake up with something warm running down your cheek and something cool flopped across your stomach. The latter is normal, as far as you can remember - ever since the game ended you’ve slept in piles with Gamzee, and the weight of his arm has become a comfort. The first thing, though, is not normal. You wiggle a hand out from under your moirail to touch it, and it stings; when you bring your fingers in front of your face, bleary-eyed and starting to suspect something’s wrong, everything happens at once.

You register the blood on your fingers - and, consequently, on your face - first: warm blood, red blood, and you freeze on reflex. A split second after that Gamzee tenses, and you notice that he’s not sprawled across the pile like he usually is. His other hand is curled up into a fist against his collarbone, and the arm on top of you is actually clinging hard enough that his claws dig a little into your side. He thrashes a little, flails as best he can with the room he has, and you think you can figure out how that cut got on your face.

Well, this isn’t good. He’s had nightmares before, both of you have, but he always wakes up right away and then wakes you up from clinging. You don’t want to have to try and shake him out of it, not because you’re afraid of getting hurt but because you’re afraid he’ll be hurt from accidentally hurting you. You try to extricate yourself from under him, moving and stopping and moving again to avoid jostling him too much. You’re only glad the pile doesn’t have anything loud or prone to breaking in it, because there is a lot of shifting before you finally squirm free.

You sit off to the side and watch him, half your attention on running through what you need to get breakfast ready once he gets up. You were planning on letting him wake on his own, but after three minutes of watching him whimper and following the up-down motion of his side as his breath comes in jerky, terrified gasps, you can’t anymore. His claws are digging into his arms, his palms, his jaw, anywhere he can reach; blood beads at the point of contact and purple lines puff up where the marks are just shallow enough to not break his skin.

You gather up his wrists in one hand in a quiet moment, and brush his hair out of his face with the other. “Gamzee? Gamzee, wake up, it’s just a dream.” You pat his face firmly, make your voice louder, and on one final “Gamzee!” he starts awake and makes to headbutt you in the nose.

You catch him by the horn a split second before, and watch his eyes go from frantic-wide to slow, confused blinking. As he becomes more coherent, his eyes focus on the bright spot on your face - oh, no, you should’ve cleaned it up, covered it somehow, oh no - and his mouth crumples and he tries to pull away.

“No, no, shh,” you tell him, and curl your free hand behind his neck to pull him back.

“M'sorry, sorrysorry,” he murmurs. He stops struggling and presses his forehead to the spot between your collarbones instead. “Sorry, brother, sorry.”

You rub at the places where he hurt himself dreaming, and you suspect it’s more than the little cut he’s apologizing for. He still hasn’t told you what his nightmares are about, says he’ll tell you soon, when he’s ready, but you suspect. “What are you sorry for?” You keep your voice as quiet as you’re able, though it comes out raspy and wavers a little toward the end of the sentence.

“Everything,” he says. “M'sorry for hurting you,” and that doesn’t narrow it down much. “For- for hurting everyone else, and,” he hiccups, draws in little gasps of air, and you don’t stop him from wiping his face off on your shirt. “And  _listening_ and  _not_ listening to you, and the motherfucking  _things_ , all what things I did wrong, and  _brother_ , Karkat,” he pleads, words muffled into your chest.

You let go of his wrists to hug him properly, and forget about breakfast.

“I’m sorry too.”


	4. The Sea

Your lusus wasn’t the one who taught you to swim. 

There was a time once, sweeps and sweeps ago, when you nearly drowned. You were outside playing in the sand (and glancing up hopefully at the horizon every so often) and as the night wore on, you grew warm and tired. After a while you wondered if it would hurt to just dip your toes in the water - just a little to cool down. The sea wasn’t so bad. It certainly didn’t seem as bad as the old goat always made it out to be. But two more steps into the surf was all it took for your little light body to be dragged down by the undercurrents and out under the waves. The only reason you didn’t die was because Dad, on one of his rare trips to the waters around your hive, swept you up and deposited you on the beach. By the time you finished coughing all the water up, he was gone again. 

That time, you hadn’t meant to. The next time, though - It was the only way you knew of to get him to come back. The second time, he hadn’t come. The second time, you swallowed a stomachful of water trying to flail your way back to shore, and you’d come away from the experience with a sore throat and stinging eyes and the terrifying knowledge that you were  _this_ close to dying. It wasn’t the kind of experience you were eager to repeat, but. Well. You missed your father.

There were a few more repeats of the incident - both accidental and on purpose - over the years, but as you grew older it was worth it less and less to try. Encounters with seadwellers added to the risk, and you began to wonder if he wasn’t coming back because you were more or less a competent swimmer now. Eventually, you stopped going near the ocean at all.

You are six sweeps old. There is a storm raging outside, shrill wind and thudding rain and the occasional crunch of thunder. You still have to go outside, though, or try to - because there are errands to run and you’ve been out of food for three days and there’s always the smallest chance Goatdad is back and waiting. You pull on another shirt because you can’t find your jacket, slip on your shoes, and push open the door. 

The tide is up to within an arm’s length of your hive entrance. You consider drawing back into your hive and waiting it out, but your stomach growls and the storm might not let up for a long time yet. You can swim, barely. You’ll manage. One step into the water: fine. Two steps: still okay. A few more, and you think you might actually make it, when out of the blue (well, really out of the dark gray-green waves) someone’s orca lusus beaches itself and grabs on to your leg with its teeth. 

You don’t have time to scream before you’re pulled backwards into the ocean, and you’re glad you didn’t try, because an open mouth means more water getting down your throat and no one would hear you anyway. You thrash a bit with your arms, but it’s kind of pointless to try and float when there’s a fucking killer whale attached to your limb, and so you focus your efforts on pounding it in the face-parts. You don’t think you can hold your breath much longer. You need to breathe youneedto _breathe_  - you manage to kick the whale in the eye, and it lets go.

You pop up to the surface, gasping and coughing and getting a good amount of water in your maw anyway, but at least your lungs didn’t explode. The problem now is that you’re already exhausted, the storm is going strong, and you’re dizzy with oxygen deprivation and blood loss. You can keep your head up for another three minutes, tops, and that’s not nearly enough time to swim back to shore. Where’s your lusus, you want your lusus.

He’s not coming. 

The realization hits you at the same time as a wave slaps you in the back, and you fall below again and start to consider giving up. No one’s going to miss you, and you probably should’ve been dead a long time ago with all the stunts you pulled. You kick your legs feebly one last time, push yourself up to the surface for the briefest second -

And someone grabs hold of your horn. Their hand slips on the seawater, but the curves there help them hold on long enough for your survival instinct to kick in. You grab at the hand, cling to whatever you can, and suddenly you don’t have to move much at all to keep breathing and it’s a  _relief_. The arm you’ve got hold of starts moving, swinging a little as the troll it’s attached to climbs some sort of ladder-dealy back up onto their ship, and you just hang on and kick uselessly, trying to help however you can. 

When you open your eyes again, you have a blanket wrapped around you and a worried face looking into your own. (Later you’ll learn his name, and that he’s taking an apprenticeship out at sea, obtaining skills to help him survive however he can because it’s hard getting a job that doesn’t require a blood colour check.) You cough more, and you’re shivering so violently you swear your bones rattle. Your leg is still bleeding, leaking purple all over the nice boat deck. Your rescuer’s hands are shaking as they hover over you, and you wonder how terrifying it must have been to hang off a boat one-handed in this kind of storm. 

Eventually he gives up trying to stay dignified and just wraps himself around you, blanket and all. He’s so  _warm_ you start purring, and that is how you met your moirail. 


	5. Red

You’ve always hated the colour red. It’s a constant reminder of your inadequacies, your failings, how there was practically zero chance of you messing up the simplest act of  _being on the fucking hemospectrum_ but you went and did it anyway. It’s so bright and attention-catching, too, and you hate it for that because it’s one more on the list of things that help get you culled. In movies and art, when they want to depict something unnatural, it’s the go-to colour. And it’s undeniably  _yours_ , your signature colour even if you don’t write in it or wear it, and it’s much more so than other trolls’ colours are theirs, because they share their shade with millions who came before and after and you share your shade with the handful who rolled a pitiful score on the “not being a disgusting mutant” dice. 

  
You also default to a flight or fight response every time you see it, because if that’s your blood and not some artist’s attempt to be edgy, then you’re either dead or lucky enough to not be in public. It follows, then, that you absolutely despise seeing your colour - unnecessary stress reactions all around, even if it’s on the other side of the street from you.

Your moirail, the idiot, adores red. “S'the colour of pity,” he tells you, “miraculous loud and warm.” He tries to buy himself things in your colour, pillows and hairbrushes and little decorative things, but you draw the line at scarves. 

“Why not?” he goes, pouting and burying his nose in the wool. “It’s up and motherfucking cozy, like I’m all cuddling with you.”

You sigh and unhook your claws from the scarf. “Just… Just don’t wear it out in public, okay?” You know no one’s going to guess it’s a quadrant’s colour from just that, because assholes with poor taste wear all kinds of colours that aren’t theirs, but you just don’t feel comfortable letting Gamzee out in that. Feels like making him a target, even if that doesn’t make a lick of sense. But he relents as soon as you explain all this, and adds it to the pile instead. 

You are seven and a half sweeps old, and you miss your moirail. 

You were discovered, at six and a half sweeps, by a group of trolls who chased you to your hive, and then there were four dead bodies of relatively high blood as well as your own blood splattered all over your front steps, and there was no option left to you but  _run_. You’re only thankful you were able to bring your lusus with you, but you hadn’t wanted to run to Gamzee’s hive in case you were caught and he was dragged into it with you. And then, what with having to leave your husktop and palmhusk behind, you’d lost all contact with your moirail. It’s hard to buy electronics when you’re slinking around on the streets, hiding under a cloak and living off whatever odd jobs you can get. And you’d gotten lost at some point, so even if you want to find his hive again, it’s not an option anymore. 

It’s for the best, you tell yourself, because he deserves better than an off-spectrum freak for a moirail and he’s probably forgotten you already, between his absentmindedness and your sudden disappearance. It’s for the best. 

One day, some asshole wearing bright red triggers your freeze-and-panic response from across the street, and as soon as you register that it’s just clothing you turn on your heel to leave - but something makes you look again. It’s not patches in the places where you would normally accessorize - it’s in patterns, and mixed with a highblood shade that prods something in the back of your pan. Against your better judgement, you cross the street and try to wander past casually, hiding behind crowds of other people. 

Shit. The patterns are diamonds, and the colour is definitely that purple. What the  _fuck_ did you tell the fucking clown about wearing your colour out in public? And as clearly as a  _purple diamond with red borders_ , what the fuck, what the fuck no. But no one’s giving him a second glance, paying no mind to the skinny highblood wandering around dressed in odd rags, and anyway juggalos tend to have a thing for bright colours. 

And then your pan catches up to your instinctive scolding-moirail reflex, and you realize you have a moirail here to scold and he _remembered_ you, he  _waited for you_ , and it’s all you can do not to cry and out yourself as mutant right here in the goddamned street. 

You throw yourself at him at the same moment as he meets your eyes, and then both of you are crying - but it’s okay if the tears stain his clothes, because he’s already wearing your stupid red and  _you love him so much_. 


	6. Space

Your name is Gamzee Makara and your current status is not looking great. Even if they let you explain yourself when you’re discovered, you’re not sure you can. Well, not in under ten minutes, that’s for certain. So right now you do your best to curl up in this whatever-it-is - a broom closet? - and hope no one finds you. The floor under you is rumbling worryingly, and then it shifts and slants sideways; you realize with a start that the ship is  _taking off_ , and it won’t come back for who knows how long, and you have no clue how you’re going to get home now.

Dad’s going to be angry. That is, if he comes home at all while you’re gone. You’d only planned to leave for a little bit, just to scrounge up some food because it’s been ages since you last ate, and you couldn’t wait any longer. You’d gotten lost, wandered into the spaceship storage building, gotten lost in  _there_ , and then there were food packets in the closet and you were nearly passing out from hunger, okay. You hadn’t realized you were actually on one of the ships until it started moving, and here you are now.

Pros: the closet door is closed, and that means they won’t find you if they don’t specifically look in here. Cons: the closet door is locked, so you couldn’t get out even if you wanted to, and if they don’t find you maybe you’ll just die in here and never get home. That was maybe the wrong thing to think, because now you’re shuddering back tears. Dad was right - you can’t do anything properly, you’re useless, why are you even alive for. You scoot back, pressing your tailbone to the back wall, wrap your arms around your ankles, and press your face into your knees.

“Captain, something’s setting off this here blinky light,” a voice goes, and you freeze mid-sniffle. “Says here, uh, unexpected weight?”

“Huh, okay. I swear to fuck, though, if it turns out it was one of you sneaking fucking snacks or something on,  _someone_ will be flayed. You there, watch the controls, I’m going to go search the ship.” The captain sounds younger than you would have expected, and also a great deal more tired than he should be. Isn’t a captain supposed to sit back and order other people around? He mutters under his breath as he draws closer to where you’re hiding, and inadvertently answers your question: “Can’t trust any of these shitheads to do anything around here, fuck.”

Oh no, oh no, he’s headed this way - the door clicks and drifts open, and you wince back from the sudden light. The captain somehow manages to look intimidating even with dark circles under his eyes, a head of black hair flying every which way, and a maximum height of half-a-head-shorter-than-you. He might even be the same age as you, maybe a little older. You wonder how you look in contrast - cowering all in a ball in the back of a closet, dust on you that was already there before you crawled around on the floor in here, hair longer than it should be and possibly even messier than his, fingers chewed and picked red around the nails. Tear streaks down your face, and clothes hanging off your starving frame.

“Oh my god, kid, what the fuck,” he says to you. Then he calls to his crew: “Stowaway, I’m dealing with it. All of you man your stations and be grateful there won’t be any flaying today.” Does that mean you’re not going to be flayed? That’s good, at least. They might toss you out the airlock, though, and that’s just as bad. They might hit you, first, teach you not to, like Dad-

You shudder, press yourself back, palms against the wall like you can disappear into it. You curl your head down, shoulders hunching up, and squeeze your eyes shut to try and stop crying. “M'sorry, don’t hurt me, didn’t all up and mean to, please please please-”

“Oh god,” he repeats, though it’s less exasperated and more uncertain. “Okay, look,” he goes, and reaches out with one hand to lay it on your arm. You flinch, cringe back harder. “No, stop that, don’t…” You don’t know what you’re meant to be stopping, so you shut up because that’s always the best bet. The hand draws back, and then there’s a soft noise. You open your eyes to see him kneeling on the ground in front of you, and he looks a lot less scary and a lot more small and tired like that. “Look, I’m not going to hurt you.”

You uncurl a little to look at him through a few stray strands of hair. “Promise?”

“Yeah, promise.” He holds out a hand again, but he doesn’t touch you. You aren’t sure what to do, but he did say he wasn’t going to hurt you. He keeps his hand out like that, patient; slowly, slowly, in case you make a wrong move, you move your own hand to lay it on top of his.

“Thank you.”


	7. Magical

Your name is Karkat Vantas, and you are known around town as the Weird Occult Kid. This is a reasonable nickname, because you spend most of your time cooped up in your dad’s candle shop, and the place really hasn’t had much thought put into its exterior decoration. Nor interior, really. And a lot of the candles have odd instructions that come with them, and you can be found smirking off to the side whenever strange events happen, and you never talk to anyone and wear black most of the time, so it’s only natural that all the other kids think you meddle with dark forces and whatnot in your spare time. 

It helps that they’re not wrong. Although it’s not really “dark forces” - more like neutral magic with the occasional harmless curse thrown in. You just keep up the irritable and broody front so you can avoid talking to people. (They can’t expect you to be sociable if they’re all busy keeping a good distance away from you, can they?) 

So that’s why you never expect guests - and also you’re not especially fond of the future-seeing branches of magic - and that’s why when the chime thing on the door goes off you whirl around with a particularly pointy candlestick in hand, pointing it at the intruder. He blinks in surprise, holds his arms up in surrender - all ten miles of them, holy fuck is this guy tall - and tries on a disarming grin. 

A goat pops out of the air between the two of you. 

Okay, what. 

That is most certainly not normal. Not in any definition of the word normal. It’s three oceans and a mule ride away from normal, and even then it’s at a different altitude - Metaphors aside, what the hell is up with this guy. You frown at him, still wielding the candlestick, trying to assess what his deal is. No horns or other goat-like attributes (and he’s not actually that tall, you were just exaggerating and also okay you’re a little on the small side), so he’s not a magical being because they tend to be themed, and therefore the only other plausible explanation would be-

“Someone cursed you?”

He gives a liquid shrug. “No - well, yeah, kind of. All accidental-like, though.” You notice he’s biting his lip, and the corners of his mouth are resolutely neutral. Yeah, you can guess what triggers the goats. 

“How the fuck do you "kind of accidentally” get cursed?“ You lower your weapon by a few degrees. "Are you cursed or not, can’t fucking help you if I don’t know what the hell’s wrong.”

He beams. “Aw, you’ll help? Thanks, brother, s'all being-” Another goat appears by “you’ll”, but it takes him half the next sentence to notice. “Aw, fuck.” He droops. “Keep motherfucking forgetting.”

You put down the candle in favor of facepalming. Yeah, this guy’s no threat. (The candle wasn’t magical anyway, so it wouldn’t have done anything even if he had attacked.) “You never answered my question. What happened?”

“Shit, sorry.” He lowers his arms now, watching the candle warily, and scratches behind his ear with one hand. “Motherfucking cursed myself all accidental-like, s'what I was up and getting at. There were these mushrooms all being in a tiny ring getting their weird vibe on, and hells of motherfucking full moon yesternight, and I might’ve done broke something? Dunno, can’t really remember.”

You sigh. Well, you’ve dealt with worse. “And then someone pointed you in my direction because I look like I curse people on a daily basis. Seems reasonable. Okay, first, anyone else know? Don’t want them freaking out at me after the fact in case I mess up. Parents, friends?”

He chews on his lip a bit. “Naw, ain’t got neither of those. Used to be living with my brother, ‘til a week ago when he up an’ left. Not sure why, but he’s prob'ly not coming back.” He says this so nonchalantly you have to frown at him, and that leads to scrutinizing him a little more closely. His clothes are ragged, his hair is a mess, and he doesn’t look like he’s been eating properly. No wonder fairies are cursing him for stumbling onto their things - clearly he hasn’t got anyone to back him up if he needs retribution. 

He sees you looking at him, and slips a tiny nervous grin into the awkward silence that you accidentally let happen. Aaaand - yep, there goes another goat. How does this guy even  _survive_. You find yourself feeling sorry for him, and in self-defense from potential emotions your brain latches onto something else.

“Wait, where the fuck did you put all the other goats?” You’re assuming he pops one out every two minutes, from the rate he’s going. How does one guy smile so much when he knows he’s not supposed to? You hardly smile once a week. 

“Uh, wasn’t putting them anywhere. Should I have? Them’s all just motherfucking hanging out over there.” He gestures with an arm to the front door, and you push past him to look outside. There’s a herd of ten or so goats just, as he said, hanging out in front of your store. People are gathering in crowds to point and look. 

“You. Paraded through town with a dozen goats. Just - just like that?” You are struggling to keep from laughing at the mental image. 

“Yeah.” He nods. “Sorry?” Apologetic smile, another goat. “Shit.”

“Okay, okay, look.” You take him by the bony shoulders and steer him to the back of your shop. “This is actually pretty fucking simple - it was a fairy ring, so fairies. So we’ll go talk to them, I’ll bribe them a little, and we sell your goats off to some farmer or something. And then you’re coming back here and letting my dad feed you, because holy shit.” You’re not sure why you added that last bit in, but you’re in determination mode and that’s fine, your old man’s always bugging you to make more friends anyway.

“Uh, okay.” He watches as you gather fairy-bribing materials, plus a few spells for just in case, and seems a little overwhelmed in general. “Wait, shit - can we not all be selling the goats? I kinda like them, and there’s a huge backyard all being part of my house.”

“Yeah, sure, you do whatever with them.” You pat him on the elbow as you zip past him again to grab the box that’s been hissing nonstop for the past three days. Maybe you can get rid of it somehow on the way. “Okay, ready?”

He nods. “Thanks, bro!” He grins. Four goats. Four since you’ve met him.  

You sigh and lead the way.


	8. Growing Up

You’re eight years old, and Vriska just took your toy car. Well, to be fair, it isn’t really  _yours_ , because it belongs to the teacher or the school or whatever, but you had it in your hand and she took it and now you’re just kind of standing there dumbly as Karkat storms over. He’s plenty angry enough for you, and you wouldn’t have known what to do with the car anyway. Vriska said so. 

But you can’t just walk off to the reading corner because Karkat takes you by the elbow and drags you along to confront her. “No, brother, I’m not wanting to-” you protest, but he shakes his head firmly at you. 

“You gotta stand up for yourself, or else she’s going to do it again.” He sounds very sure of himself, and so you let him pull you up in front of Vriska and you stand watching as he yells. You don’t like fighting with Vriska, because it just means she’ll kick you in the shins when Karkat’s not looking, because she knows you won’t tell, and you never do tell because it just leads to this all over again. And if you hide, or try to tell her to stop it yourself, she storms off and goes to “play” with Tavros, which mostly just consists of her snatching things from him and telling him he’s playing all wrong and occasionally play-smacking him over the head a bit too hard. 

Karkat’s done yelling, now, and he plunks the little car in your hands all proud of himself so you can’t bring yourself to tell him that the problem doesn’t end now, that it doesn’t mean everyone’s happy when you have the car again. Vriska, as predicted, holds her chin up and pretends she “didn’t want your stupid car anyway!” and heads in Tavros’ direction. But it’s all fine if Karkat’s happy. 

You’re sixteen years old, and Karkat’s never around lately. You watch him go off after school to hang out with Terezi or Sollux more often than not, and sometimes he glances back at you all concerned but you’ve refused to tag along enough times that he doesn’t bother inviting you anymore. The thing is that no one ‘cept Karkat’s really all that fond of you - or, well, you’re seeing it that way and you might be wrong but Karkat can’t set you right if he doesn’t know what you’re thinking. And you’re not telling him, because he’s happy when he goes to watch movies and things with his other friends, and it’s not your place to tell him what he can or can’t do. That’s what bad friends do, like a certain girl who still hovers around Tavros. 

So you don’t tell him, in case they really do hate you. Because then either his big heart wins out and he stops doing what makes him happy, or he decides to abandon you completely. Neither option is good. So while he’s gone and you’re all alone you’ve taken to wandering around the streets. Sometimes nice people offer you a hit or a drink of something or other, and then you’re happy too. 

If everyone’s happy, then that’s good, right?

You’re twenty-four years old, and Karkat is yelling at you. You’ve both gotten an apartment together, and Karkat’s holding together both your livings with three jobs while you try to hold yourself together with more than three addictions. Sometimes you’re all muddled up with people and events and reasons, but you’re pretty sure tonight that neither of you are happy - and that is how, under the influence of something-or-other, you end up having a shouting match with your only friend left in the world. 

“Karkat, tiny brother, you’re all up and getting your bad self  _fucking exhausted can you not see that_  I’m not all wanting to be _motherfucking coddled by a motherfucker_  what can’t even stay on his feet, bro,  _let me get to be motherfucking doing something_  please.” You blink, rub at your eyes, lean on the wall. 

“Yeah? You want to do something, you want to fucking fix whatever’s wrong with this situation, do you?” You, you’re whispering half the time and shouting the other, but your bro is shouting half the time and double-shouting the rest. “You can’t say I’m fucking  _coddling_ you, you shithead, if you’re in pieces and I’m constantly picking them up! I know I’m tired, but what the fuck do you expect from me if the only other option is to let both of us die out in the rain?” His knuckles are white on the chair back he’s clenched onto, and you’re only stressing him more but. But. 

“But what d'you want,  _what’s a motherfucker up and to do_ , what do I gotta be getting on to make you happy again?” Fuck this, you can’t argue with him. “Best friend, what do I  _do_?”

He slumps. “I don’t need you to do anything, that’s the fucking  _point_. You need to not avoid things you need to talk to people about and let it get to this extent, because then there’re problems for everyone, okay? I’ll handle things by myself until you sort out your shit, I can manage. Probably.” He rubs the heel of his hand over his forehead. “Shit, that sounds like exactly what you’re complaining about.” He looks so  _frustrated_ that you want to go over, wrap him up in a hug and forget about all this until later, but you know your best friend know what’s good for you and if he wants you to not avoid things then okay. You will help him get this worked out. 

“And you can’t possibly be happy cooped up in the house all day, shit, what was I thinking?” He can’t trust you outside the house, of course, in case you give in to impulse or get yourself kidnapped or something. He has to have control of everything, your Karkat, and most times it leaves him spent. “Right, okay, you know what? I’m quitting the night job, and you’re going to - to help Sollux out at his electronics shop. He won’t act like he’s babysitting you, and Terezi sometimes drops by so she can help keep an eye on you so you don’t break any shit.” He looks up. “Sounds good?”

Well, he’s getting himself some rest and you can finally do  _something_ to help, so you can’t see anything to be complaining about. And you’ll work on what got you here, the larger underlying issues, but slowly and gradually. “Yeah. Sounds good, best friend.”


	9. Meeting

You are on the phone with Tavros Nitram, and also in related news you are really fucking stressed. You hadn’t thought helping organize a friendly get-together with only like a dozen people would be so harrowing - in fact, you didn’t intend to take any role besides “show up and not set anything on fire”, but, as usual, you’re somehow in charge of a bunch of things now. 

“No, I’m  _fucking saying_  the size of the plates isn’t supposed to be this big of a deal, it’s fucking paper, if the assholes want more food they can load up another plate!”

“Right, uh, that’s what I just - I mean, I was also saying that, so, I don’t think you should be getting this upset over it? Can we just - oh, hold on, Aradia wants me, uh, sorry, here Gamzee hold this for a second -”

“No, fuck, Nitram you get back here this instant -” The fact that he’s just as overworked as you are gives him no excuse to just walk away in the middle of a discussion, what the heck. 

“Whoa, shit brother, what’s got you motherfucking up and swearing something fierce at my good bro what as just got himself motherfucking in demand for up and getting his planning on for this shindig?”

You pause in your ranting just to try and parse what he’s saying, and when it comes out to amounting to about five words of actual information you snarl into the receiver and start in on this stranger. “What’s got me fucking swearing is idiots wasting time with all the fucking details and the thing is  _three days from now_ and hhrrrghhh.” You bump your head down on a table. 

“Aw, bro, shit sounds all kinds of motherfucking troublesome,” comes the voice in a sympathetic tone, and part of you goes “yes yes that is true you are getting me” and the other part goes “what the fuck Karkat you don’t unload personal agitation on a complete stranger what’s your problem”. While you contemplate this, the voice goes on. “Ain’t doing nobody no good to get your knickers all up and in fancy convolutions, though, if'n you’re to be chilling and taking a break mayhaps something good’ll all up and get its happen on right without your needing to do anything.”

Weird, Tavros has been telling you this exact thing for the past two hours but only now is it starting to kind of get through to you. Is it the clown-talk? Probably not. “I don’t have time for breaks,” you grumble, though it’s only for-show reluctance. “I have so much shit to get through it’s a miracle I don’t drown in it all.”

“Motherfuck, see, you’re getting it. Just gotta get your believe on of those miracles, and if breaks aren’t a thing that can up and happen there’s still other sorting-out that don’t involve so much stress, yeah?”

Hm. He has a point. Again. After you get off the phone with Tavros - whenever he comes back - maybe you can go and actually buy some of the things the group has already decided on, do something productive that doesn’t require any thinking for once. “It’s a miracle I even understand what you’re saying. But thanks,” you tell him, begrudgingly. 

“Not a motherfucking problem, bro. Ah, Tavbro’s coming this way. See you at the party-thing!”

Later, before you hang up, Tavros notes that you’re much more reasonable and relaxed for some reason. You don’t even snap at him for commenting on it. 

-

You have just been laid off and are feeling miserable. It’s two in the morning, you’re kind of lost on purpose, and you’re wandering around downtown trying to figure out what you’re going to do from here. Your hair is a mess, your face is a mess, and your life is a mess. You’re also a little drunk. 

Well, whatever. Maybe you’ll just lie down right here on this bench! Maybe you’ll rob a store. There’s nothing to stop you from doing anything you want. Because if you can’t get another job by the end of the week you’re screwed for rent, and none of your friends live close enough for you to ask for any kind of help other than money, and fuck any version of future you that even considers asking for money from your friends. Most of them aren’t much more well-off than you are, and you would be terrible to ask that of them. 

You go ahead and lie down right there on the bench. You don’t really care anymore. You can deal with whatever in the morning, when you’re not as drunk and upset. You will be fine, as long as you don’t… start… crying here…

Shit.

There’s no one around to see, but you curl up in a defensive ball anyway because you always hate crying in public. Watching romcoms at home in the early hours of the morning is one thing; this is another. 

“Hey, uh, bro, are you okay?” You jump out of your skin at the voice - you swear there was no one around just a minute ago, you looked and everything - and nearly fall off the bench. A hand hovers near your shoulder, as if going to steady you, but it doesn’t quite make it there before it’s drawn back and by then you’re sitting up and hastily wiping at your face anyway. 

“What, what the fuck, where the fuck did you come from,” you stutter out, and look up at a tallish guy about your age wearing ratty clothes and a worried expression. Homeless person? He looks kind of concerningly pale. Before you can continue along your line of queries (examples such as “how the fuck” and “what” come to mind), he parks himself on the bench next to you.

“You’re all looking motherfucking distressed,” he comments, and you’re still too freaked out to say  _no duh_  or  _you don’t say?_  “Wanna up and spill to a motherfucker what got time on his hands and nowhere else to go?" 

You think, fuck it, you’d made the decision a few minutes back to let Next Morning You deal with any and all consequences Drunk You creates. You take a shuddery breath in and tell him - how you’d thought you could make it out here by yourself, how you’d had the opportunity to move in with a friend and help each other with money issues, how your pride had insisted on staying here with your terrible job and your terrible apartment. How you really fucking regret a lot of the choices you made, and it’s too late to go back on them, and now you’re stuck here and you have absolutely no clue what to do. 

He hums in sympathy, keeps making aborted gestures like to rub your back or pat your shoulder or rest a hand on your knee, but either he changes his mind a lot or he’s thinking you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like physical contact from strangers. Which would be true in any other circumstances, but. 

By the end you’re winding down and much, much calmer, so you turn and thank him and he smiles at you all "no big deal I was just here listening to you talk for over an hour in the cold at two am” and you make another terrible decision and go to hug him. 

You fall right through air, and when you recoil back he’s standing up somehow and -

Oh. He’s fading away. He’s dead? Or a hallucination. You really hope he’s dead, as terrible as that sounds, because that at least means he existed at some point and wasn’t a product of your stressed-out brain. You collect yourself enough to, right before he vanishes entirely, wave and tell him “thank you” again. 

-

Your day at work was fucking terrible, and all you want to do is fall over onto the couch and never get up. It’s a Friday, too, so you actually have the option of doing that. Hallelujah. But something feels off, so after you take your shoes off you sit on the edge of the couch instead of fwumping and look more closely. 

Your painting’s askew, there are a few crumbs in the hallway leading to the kitchen, and - if you listen really closely - you can hear the faint crinkling of wrappers. Shit. Just what you needed - a burglar to still be in the house. They don’t even have to decency to leave and let you deal with your losses in your own time (after a nap or three)? Wow, rude. 

You sigh and creep into the kitchen on your tip-toes, armed with a shoe and just really done with everything. The crinkling is coming from one of your larger cupboards, and for a moment you’re hopeful - maybe just a really big rat? But nope. You nudge the door open with your foot and there is an actual live human squished in there somehow, desperately shifting to try and not make noise with the six or so instant noodle packet wrappers in there. 

“Wow. Great. You fucking break into my house on a Friday night, and it’s for fucking instant noodles. You didn’t even cook them! If you were going to stay in here long enough for me to come home in the meantime, why didn’t you fucking cook them?!” You realize you are scolding your burglar, but it’s been a long week, okay?

“… m'sorry,” he squeaks, and makes more movements. You stare, and then thwack him over the head with your shoe. 

“Don’t tell me you’re stuck.”

“I, uh, I’m not all to be motherfucking stuck?” Well, he tried. He’s still in your cupboard, clearly, and this needs fixing. Somehow. Um. Hm. What to do. 

“Okay, so, no don’t move - I’m going to remove these wrappers and you’re going to try and get both those elbows facing downward. And in the meantime you’re going to tell me why you’re in here, because I feel like I have a right to know.”

“Uhh, okay, bro. If you say so.” He squirms a little when you have to reach past his sides, but otherwise complies. “Was just motherfucking getting my hungry on, was all, didn’t mean to do no harm.” Well, he didn’t really do much harm - instant noodles are the opposite of expensive, and if you can get him out of here and on his way maybe you won’t have missed that much sleeping time. 

“Okay, yeah I gathered that from the empty noodle packets. But like, why are you even fucking hungry enough to be breaking into people’s houses is my question.” You manage, through prodding and prompting, to get the full story out of him - his dad left him a few months ago with no notice whatsoever, he ran out of food last week, and he’s been scrounging through garbage and things because trying to steal from supermarkets scares him. “Ohh my god,” you sigh, “how the fuck are you even alive, you idiot?”

“Sorry?” He bites his lip and looks confused, and that is the point when you decide fuck it, too much trouble to kick him out. 

“You get the couch. Do not trail crumbs all over the floor again if you need to eat; we’re talking in the morning.” With that and one final pull, he’s out and you’re upstairs heading to bed. 


	10. Ghibli

You’re just chilling in your river, being part of it and in between everything inside it, and you’re not expecting anything to happen today because nothing at all has happened for the last few months. You’re certainly not expecting any human children to run and trip and fall into you, because your river is actually a pretty secluded one and people don’t tend to run directly into rivers unless they’re being chased by something. You manifest briefly into a goat-head to peek above the surface - nope, nothing behind him but the trees and wind. Nothing at all in this forest-scape except the trees and wind, and you and the kid. He’s thrashing impressively loudly, and whoops you should probably go help him. It always boggles you to remember some humans can’t swim. 

You tip up the tail part of your currently-metaphorical mergoat body, and the waves curl and tilt and splash his little self up on shore. You hang around for a little bit, thin sheets of water washing up close to but not quite touching, and watch as he coughs all the water out and lies there shivering for a few moments. But soon enough he stands back up, wobbling a little, and strides back in the direction he came from. 

Human children are so cute sometimes. 

It is years after you saved the human child, and you have no idea what’s going on. You can hardly remember your name in this chaos. From the bits and pieces that keep floating by from other, similarly confused spirits, something big happened in the ocean - enough to flood a good chunk of land by the beach, which includes the majority of your own river. Now there are dozens of river spirits, lake spirits, and pond spirits all swirling around in the mess, and pretty soon you’re going to blend with all the others and lose your sense of self. You don’t want to know what that might mean for your river, after the flooded area goes back to normal. 

In a last-ditch attempt to separate yourself, you use up all your remaining magic to manifest in your mergoat form. Unfortunately, all your remaining magic turns out to not be that much, and you are considerably smaller than you’d wanted to be. About the size of three goldfish, maybe. Which means, if you don’t find some kind of land to rest up on, you might exhaust yourself and drown. 

That would really suck, being a river spirit and drowning. 

You set off toward a shadow in the distance, hoping that it’s more substantial than it appears. Swimming is much harder than you remember it being, and all the submerged human-structures you keep having to avoid doesn’t help much. By the time you get to your destination, you’re drifting by on the barest twitches of your tail. You flop up on a porch - the house is on a hill, so it’s just high enough to not be swallowed by the water. 

You lie there for a little bit, completely tired out. You feel the footsteps before you hear them, but it doesn’t make much difference because you couldn’t move if your life depended on it, and so you just stay where you are and hope for a miracle. It comes, in the form of little human hands that you actually recognize (funny thing about being something close to a god - hoping for miracles sometimes works), and you snuffle into them when they scoop you up. 

The next thing you remember, you’re on a blanket. It’s bunched up into a little pile so you can rest on it without drowning, and it’s nice and dark here. Wherever here is. You lift yourself up onto your feet and stretch, yawning. 

“Oh, you’re up.” You look beside you, and yes there he is, your little human boy. “Are you okay? Do you need anything?”

You shake your head. He bites his lip, probably realizing you can’t talk in this form, and starts in on a dizzying game of twenty questions. 

“Can you tell me why I feel like I recognize you?” Shake. “Are you all right being out of water?” Nod. “Can you take a human form?” Nod. “Are you able to do it right now?” Shake. You don’t have enough magic, even after sleeping. “Hm.” He thinks for a minute. “Are you hungry?” Nod nod nod. 

A little while later, he has a simple meal of noodles and boiled eggs set out, and carries you on his arm to the table. You proceed to snarf down all of the egg whites and most of the noodles. He frowns and pokes a yolk, sending it rolling towards you. 

“You don’t eat these?” Shake. “They’re good for you.” You look at it doubtfully. Lean forward, take a nibble. Make a bleh face, and that’s that. 

A couple hours later, you’re curled up in the crook of his elbow watching human movies with him, and something tingles inside you. Aw, you think, I knew I shouldn’t have up and ate that egg yolk. And then all of a sudden you’re in your human form - dressed for summer, so shorts and no shirt - and crammed up awkwardly against his side. 

“Uh. Whoops.” You grin at him. “So, what were those questions you were all wanting to ask earlier?”


	11. Before Sgrub

It should have been obvious, in hindsight. Gamzee Makara is a mess of a troll, all chewed-on claws and chewed-up thinkpan. He can’t get himself together even on good days, and you’re always checking up on him, making sure he’s eating, and it strikes you as absurd that Past You didn’t even notice how pale those things were. Present You has only just now noticed, after catching yourself thinking “too tired to talk to anyone but maybe just a word to Gamzee before going to ‘coon, just to make sure he hasn’t managed to blow himself up somehow in the half hour since you last talked to him”. 

And so Present You is flipping his shit just a little tiny bit. 

No one can blame you, though - you mean, anyone would be this freaked out if they just realized they’ve had a pale crush on a sopored-addicted highblood clown for at least a sweep now, maybe longer. Oh God. Now is not the time to recall every single pale romcom you have ever watched, no, bad Karkat. What would you even pacify in the brain-dead, passive, laid-back, too-friendly idiot? Nothing, that’s what. And therefore it would never work out, and that is why you need to get over the crush right now. 

… now. Maybe now? 

He doesn’t even like you back. At least, you don’t have any reason to think he does. 

terminallyCapricious [TC] began trolling carcinoGeneticist [CG]  
TC: hEeY bRoThEr.  
TC: mOtHeRfUcKiNg GoT aLl In ThE tHiNgS yOu SaId To Up AnD pUt In ThE hAnD cUt WhAt’S aS tO mAkInG iT bEtTeR.  
TC: aM i AlLoWeD tO gEt My TaLk At On YoU nOw?

It’s a few nights after your initial realization, and this time the moron has managed to get himself all torn up from a broken drink receptacle, and after you found out you’d absolutely refused to even read his messages until he fixed himself up. It’s the best you can do when he’s not physically close enough for you for run over and do it for him, and it’s so pale you might barf. 

You’re all caught up in thinking about the disadvantages in acting so pale for him when it’s most likely unrequited, and how much of it can count as taking advantage - he’s read the schoolfeeds on romance, you made him do it so you could rant at him about your romcoms, and now you don’t know whether or not you regret it because is it better for him to not realize how pale you act towards him or?? But the point is you’re distracted, and after about five minutes of no response more lines of wobbly purple text roll in. 

TC: yOu AlL uP aNd BeInG oKaY tHeRe?  
TC: aIn’T lIkE yOu To SpAcE oUt SuCh As I gEt To DoInG sOmEtImEs.

He’s worried about you. This wouldn’t be normally something noteworthy, but you have him and the pale quadrant on your mind and now that you think about it, there have been plenty of incidents where he’s shown slightly more concern than socially acceptable for troll friendship. You’d thought that was just him being the pan-damaged dimwit he is, and didn’t dwell on it, but -

carcinoGeneticist [CG] began trolling gallowsCalibrator [GC]

After the initial “pleasantries”, you ask her how Gamzee acts toward her, and stop being cagey this is important. She nearly goes into eyebrows-raised investigation mode, but you manage to convince her to leave it for now by way of pledging to let her dissect you later on. And then you troll Eridan, and Tavros, and anyone else you can think of who’s had enough interaction with Gamzee to be of any help. And they all tell you, or send you snippets of chatlogs: Gamzee only acts that much worried-tender with you. 

You’re not sure how to feel about that. About how he always asks how you’re doing, listens to you ramble even though he has no obligation to do that whatsoever, sometimes even manage to reassure you in the roundabout way he does. And when you think harder, about his cold hands and his crumbling horns, with no clue what he’s doing and all alone in his hive, lusus as good as gone (no one to _take care of him_  but you). 

Your name is Karkat Vantas, and there are many terrible, shitty things in your life right now. But you think maybe this pale crush can be the only one of those terrible things that you are okay with. 


	12. After Sgrub

Once upon a time, you were an alien clown who played a game and killed your friends, but right now you are human and you have two things: a) no idea what you’re doing with your life, and b) a fever.

Everyone was separated from everyone else when the game ended, and you haven’t found anyone yet. It could be you’re not looking hard enough, but it’s already not easy trying to figure out how this human world works when you hadn’t even gotten through with understanding your own society. You slip up everywhere - getting food, finding a place to sleep, using words as aren’t used by your new planetmates - but you can usually pull on the demeanor of someone drugged so’s they don’t know left from right, and people wave it off, don’t give you second glances.

It’s been a month, you think, and so you’ve managed to pick up a few things here and there. Like how people keep asking you if you need to go to a “hospital”, and strongly suggesting that you do that, and so one time you asked where it was and why they wanted you to go there and they said, over that hill and you don’t look very well. You think that’s their polite way of saying you don’t look safe to be around, and they want you out of the way like how a few of your friends used to look at you, back in the game. 

Well, now you are really and truly sick, and definitely not looking well, and there isn’t anywhere you can think of to go but the “hospital” you kept hearing about. You wrap your too-warm fingers around your shivering arms, and you manage to stumble your way along until you reach the front doors of the hospital building. You fumble through the reception area, talk to a bunch of people who seem to know what they’re doing, and finally get situated in a waiting room seat. There are tiny human children wailing their aeration sacs out, and elderly humans coughing into their hands, and various kids your age holding limbs at odd angles or somethings to where they’re bleeding a strange, brilliant red. 

You huddle down in your seat and shake from the cold and try not to draw too much attention to yourself. It was hard to even notice you were sick, before, because this strange new body is not highblood-cold, because everything is too warm and when you sleep outside everything is corpse-cold, and Karkat isn’t here to tell you to take care of yourself. 

“Fuck, how the hell did you even manage to do that, there aren’t even any mountains or ruins to climb in the middle of a city you idiot,” comes a familiar voice, and you would snap your head up but that’s too much effort and it would catch people’s attention. Instead you keep very very still and listen. It’s a group of two coming in through the door, and out of the corner of your eye you glimpse a girl with huge black hair and red woven into her clothing - old habits die hard - holding her arm awkwardly. She has playful sheepishness in her voice when she answers, but you don’t catch what she says. 

A heavy sigh comes in response, followed by “All right, but I’m only watching you until Sollux gets here, you hear? I’m a busy tr- guy, things to fucking do that aren’t watching accident-prone girls for overworked assholes.” There’s a pause, and a worried frown in his voice when he continues. “Only found the two of you so far, no clue where anyone else is, and knowing the group of morons we’ve got they could get themselves in all kinds of shit if I’m not watching them.”

“Oh, Karkat,” Aradia says, and that would have been it, it would’ve been the confirmation you needed but two things stop you from looking up at him and going “three, you’ve done found three now brother you did good don’t worry no more”: one, you’re not sure any of them even want you back, and two, you’ve just fainted. 

Falling facefirst into the floor doesn’t do your head any favours, you find out when you wake up. That’s all right, though, because you wake up in Karkat’s arms and to Karkat’s voice and all that’s left is  _does he recognize you_  and  _does he want you back_. 

“-if you fucking die on me now of all times I will  _personally_ resurrect you just to murder you again,  _painfully_ \- oh.” His panicked snarl dwindles away when you blink your eyes open, and your vision’s still a little blurry but hey if that isn’t a tiny sweet little smile on his face, the kind as he wouldn’t let stay if he knew it was happening. “See, s'exactly what I said, can’t let these assholes alone a second.” These words are directed to the person hovering with a hand on his left shoulder, and better that than have them be for you because you can’t hardly spare effort to talk back right now. 

“Okay. Okay,” he goes after a bit, and you think he just discreetly swiped a sleeve across his face, “Aradia, are you okay with staying here by yourself for a few minutes? Sollux said he’d be here in ten minutes… however long ago, and this idiot can’t be trusted not to fuck anything up if, if.”

“Of course, Karkat! No need to worry, I don’t actually need a - a babysitter, unlike what Sollux seems to think. It’s not like this arm can get any more broken or whatever it is from me just sitting here, right?”

“Right, yeah. Thanks, I - thanks.” Arms shift under you and you try to make your legs help, and between the two of you standing up is a thing that happens, and after that you just cling and let Karkat lead you wherever. It’s going to be okay now - you’re home. 


	13. The Sun

You’re just about to call it a night and go to sleep when you see him. At first, you think it’s just a shadow or someone’s discarded furniture, but when you look a second time it becomes clear that there is an actual living troll outside, sitting on the ground with about half an hour until sunrise. He doesn’t look like he’s from around here (blood too high a colour, from what you can make out on his shirt), and he also doesn’t look like he’s going to go anywhere anytime soon, and you wonder what he’s doing just sitting there when there are thirty minutes between him and burning to a crisp. Maybe he’s visiting a quadrant around here? But then why is he out there alone, why isn’t he getting ready to find shelter? You hope for his sake that he’s not stuck out there with no one he knows to take him in - no troll in their right mind would open their door to a stranger, especially one of a higher caste - but as the minutes tick by it’s looking more and more likely.

Against your better judgement, you move to a downstairs window to watch him more closely. He’s curled his arms around his knees, and he has something that might be a jacket draped over his horns. That won’t offer him a scrap of protection when the sun’s fully up, though; it doesn’t even fully cover his face. He doesn’t seem to have any other method of shielding himself, and there isn’t any shade from trees or buildings to hide in. He is, from what you can gather, pretty damn screwed.

Oh well. None of your fucking business. All the obligation you have to this world adds up to precisely jack shit, honkbeast eggs, zero like the amount of fucks you give about highblooded strangers. 

Zero, you’re saying. None. 

Oh fucking god. You keep glancing at the tiny hunched figure (only tiny from here,  _perspective Karkat fucking perspective is a thing and it will get you murdered_ ) and wondering what would happen to it when the sun comes up, whether you’ll walk outside tomorrow to a hunk of charcoal or if it’ll still look like troll, or maybe the burning will be slow and you’ll hear scrabbling and screaming as you try to get to sleep - 

Fuck. 

You heave a long-suffering sigh soaked through in nervousness, and make your way to the front door. Your lusus is screeching his disapproval, advising against either opening the door this early in the morning or against opening the door when there is a stranger outside, but you shove past him because this is a terrible decision, which basically just means you were doomed to make it in the first place. 

Shit shit shit you waited a little tiny bit too long, and the sun is already visible, spreading its deadly bright warmth across the ground and shrinking the shadows little by little. You see the highblood flinch away from the rays, cower a little smaller under his meager covering, and your bloodpusher stops just a little. He hears the creaking of your door hinges, though, and now it’s too late to do anything but whisper-shout at him to get the fuck over here before he burns to a crisp. 

He blinks blankly at you, not moving. You curse. There is a very tiny handful of seconds before it’s too late to save him, and so you bite your lip and sprint. The heat touches your back immediately, and at first you think this isn’t so bad, but as you run you feel it starting to warm your skin to the point of discomfort. Shit ow fuck. You grab his wrist, haul him up - surprisingly light for a highblood, for being so tall, for the size of his horns is he not feeding himself properly - and pretty much throw yourself through your doorway and into the safety of the shadows. 

Thank fuck. You don’t think you’re peeling any, from what you can tell. Your rescuee, however, is not so fortunate. Cold skin must be more sensitive to the light or something, because you can see purple in patches all across his face already, and his skin is doing terrible things on the back of his neck. (Purple, oh god, that’s a really high colour what were you thinking?)

Well, too late to regret much of anything now. And it’s with that thought in mind that you find yourself scrubbing at the stranger’s horns while he sits like a spooked meowbeast in an ablution trap of cold water, to a background murmuring of “motherfuck brother can’t even begin to start getting my gratitude on how all what happened” and “thank you thank you thankyou”. He keeps trying to look up at you with this hopeful cautious smile, and it makes you feel too weird so you just wrench his head back to facing the other way by his horns and scold him a little for messing up his hair this badly. 

Slowly the story of how he got out there winds out of him, and you start accidentally telling him things that have been on your mind, bothering you - and then you’re clipping his nails for him, whoops. At one point you rile yourself up so badly over some past mistake that he dares to lay a hand over yours, smile at you again to calm you down. You hadn’t realized cold hands would feel so nice over the burns on your fingers. 

Maybe that wasn’t such a terrible decision after all. 


	14. Capslock

You are Gamzee Makara, newly-conscripted subjugglator trainee, and you are unbelievably lost. 

Like, you swear you only took a grand total of three turns and you’ve been on this spaceship only an hour at most, but holy hell do you have no clue where you are. You are among a bunch of midbloods who look a few sweeps older than you, and that is clue one that you’re not where you’re supposed to be. Clue two is that you were told to make your way to your new respiteblocks, which you will each be sharing with a lowblooded roommate (something about documenting tendencies in dealing with inferiors, so they can make work placements more easily), and this here is an open hall and in no way any sort of respiteblock. 

Clue three is your just-handed-out regulation palmhusk buzzing loudly, repeatedly, and incessantly - probably said roommate wondering where the hell you are, half an hour after your designation meeting time. You find an empty spot of wall to lean on and stay out of the way as you slip out the little official-looking device. Shit, this thing’s hard to get used to. It takes you a little bit to even find the proper screen for chatlogs, and at the top you see how your roommate contacted you - the assigned numbers on your room listing paper seem to be your chat handles, at least for now. 

Your train of thought is interrupted when you finally lay eyes on the lines of text popping onto your screen. It takes you a moment to realize what makes them seem so  _familiar_  but when you do - holy motherfuck. Mirthful messiahs and hellwhimsical all sorts of unfunny shit wow fuck. 

The text is in capslock. You hadn’t parsed it at first, because instead of gray it’s the deepest rust you’ve ever laid eyes on, but it’s all caps and there’s only one brother you know who types like that, and only like that with no other quirks all added in. You dare to hope. 

WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU, YOU UTTER BULGEWIPE OF A ROOMMATE.   
I MEAN I HAVE TO PUT UP WITH YOU FOR HALF A SWEEP AT LEAST OR UNTIL EITHER OF US DIES.  
SO I THINK YOU’RE MAKING SOMETHING OF A TERRIBLE FUCKING IMPRESSION HERE BY BEING NOWHERE TO BE FUCKING FOUND.

All you can do is watch, in case you do something wrong and it all vanishes like it never happened. 

HOW THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO “GREET YOU CIVILLY OR OTHERWISE” IF YOU’RE NOT HERE, TELL ME THAT.

You thought he’d been culled or something, because after the game all twelve of you were immediately separated and subsequently conscripted, you thought he was dead, you thought, you thought. You decide to stop thinking. 

AND GREAT. YOU’RE NOT EVEN ANSWERING YOUR MESSAGES, HOW THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO GET AHOLD OF YOU NOW?

How do you reply, anyway? You can’t for the life of you conjure up a keyboard to mash your fingers into. It’s all you want to do, other than find your way to your block so you can actually get your confirm on proper that this isn’t some kind of unfunny as shit joke. 

AT WHAT POINT DOES “MISSING” TURN INTO DEAD I’D LIKE TO APPLY FOR A NEW ROOMMATE.  
brother where the motherfuck did you all get to be coming from

It’s too hard to figure out how to set your blood colour or decide on a quirk, but there is silence from the other end of the conversation anyway. Minutes tick by, and you start to think something happened, want to get moving to check but with no clue which way to move to. 

ASSHOLE YOU UTTER COMPLETE ASSHOLE I THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD

Hey now, that’s just unfair. None of you have had any contact with any of the others, and you have much more reason to think he’s dead than he does to think -

YOU GOT YOURSELF LOST AGAIN, DIDN’T YOU.   
IT’S THE ONLY PLAUSIBLE EXPLANATION.   
uhh yeah bro sorry  
how

You hadn’t meant to send that just like that, but soon as you do, like magic or miracles your best brother has summoned you up a little map-thing with angry gray arrows from where your location is registering to where your respiteblock is. 

You start on your way there, and you think this whole training to be an adult thing won’t be so bad if you’ve got Karkat beside you every step of the way. (And you won’t ever have to fill out all that paperwork pertaining to “I killed my assigned roommate, may I have another?” Extra bonus.)


	15. More Than A Friend

“Okay,” Terezi says, knife-grin already widening, “I bet you a cherry smoothie that you can’t… go make friends with Makara!”

You hide your nervous gulp under a scowl and cross your arms. When you’d said you could handle any dare she threw at you, this wasn’t what you had in mind. It’s not just the cost of the smoothie on the line, either - there are people like  _Vriska_ watching, you can’t afford to refuse straight-up and that means you’ll have to at least make an attempt. And so eight-year-old you holds your head up high and stomps toward the weird clown kid in the corner of the field, feet landing heavy and solid so you can’t accidentally turn back. 

He looks up as you draw closer, eyes wide and shoulders hunched, his hands in his pockets and his attention all on you. You clear your throat awkwardly, but it’s too late to make your trajectory seem anything other than forced and out-of-the-blue. He looks like he thinks he might be in trouble or something, and it would make you laugh to think anyone could be scared of you, could compare you to the forboding looming of a teacher or other such authority figure, but the way he cowers isn’t actually funny.

“Hey.” Wow, great start, Vantas, way to make a solid impression and introduce a decent conversation topic at the same time. “You’re Gamzee, right?" 

He nods. When you don’t say anything else, just sort of shuffle your feet around in the grass trying to think of what you could possibly do to  _make friends_ with this puzzle of a boy, he hunches down farther and twists his mouth down, unfriendly. You flick a quick glance up to his eyes and oh, you suddenly remember why it was dare-worthy to approach him. His eyes are dark, his entire expression is dark and practiced in the glowering go-away that makes you unreasonably terrified. His teeth are showing, and though they’re normal kid teeth - more crooked than yours, human-blunt and with no reason to be threatening - you take a step back anyway. 

"So!” He jumps, face back to startled-open like it was when you first started, and you feel bad for scaring him despite the air now no longer is heavy with that uncertain fear. “So. I’m Karkat Vantas. It’s nice to meet you.” You extend a hand and firmly mean your statement, and you actually do because so far this encounter has proved interesting if nothing else, and your dad always says to mean the empty polite statements most of all. 

“You too,” he mumbles, so quietly you wouldn’t have heard him if the kids back near the playground weren’t watching the two of you with quiet fierce intensity. He doesn’t take your hand. 

“I have a question for you,” you go on, forcing all the firmness in your voice like you have a right to be here, to bother this quiet boy minding his own business here in the corner. “Why do none of the other kids talk to you?” Okay, so, you panicked a little and that’s nowhere near a reasonable question to start a friendship off on, but it’s out there now. 

“I dunno,” comes the answer, accompanied by a loose shrug. “S'pose they’re all to being scared or something? Or could be like how they’re up and looking at me like as how Dad’s always doing.”

You refuse to flounder, and put off asking “and how does your dad look at you, then” for later. His home life is none of your business, at this point. “Well, maybe it’s because you don’t talk to them, idiot.” And before you can stop yourself, you take him by the wrist and haul him over to where the other kids are waiting. 

“Here.” You pull him to a stop in front of them, and it would be hilarious watching him panic if the terrified set of his shoulders and the way his hand tightens reflexively around yours (how did that get there?) didn’t invoke some strange protective feeling in your gut. “Say hi,” you order, letting go of his hand to nudge him forward.

He waves, one hand all hesitant wiggling fingers, and a few kids laugh. You’re glad you don’t hear malice.

-

You’re eighteen, and Terezi’s invited you to a get-together with a bunch of the others. You bring Gamzee, of course, and watch fondly as he meanders over to join a clump of his friends with all of the nonchalant casualness you didn’t see when you met him. 

Terezi makes some comment about the two of you being close or something - you aren’t paying attention. 

“What?”

“You live together now. And you’re always with him; figure you know him better than family nowadays, don’t you?”

“What are you getting at?” Her gaze is relaxed - she’s not interrogating you. But Terezi Pyrope doesn’t make small talk or pointless comments - she has to be getting at something. 

“I think you owe me a cherry smoothie. The dare was to become friends with Gamzee, and you went and made platonic boyfriends with him instead! Very unfair, I’d say.” She’s grinning at you now, bright and pleased with herself. 

You sigh, but a smile is tugging at your mouth too, and you don’t argue. 


	16. Change

He’s there in the dorm room already when you get there, but even though he looks up and sees you, he doesn’t make any sort of greeting. It’s just as well, you suppose, because after getting everything together to move in you’re tired to your bones and hurting for something to take the edge off your mind. 

You shuffle around the room getting your things unpacked with the minimal effort required so that you can sort-of almost just-barely live here. You observe him out the corner of your eye: he looks a mess. His hair is sticking up in places where he’s obviously pulled at it, run his hands through it, scratched furiously at his scalp for lack of anything better to do. His eyes have tired bags under them, and his gaze wanders uneasily and settles on nothing. Light red lines peek out from under his sleeves, where he’s scratched at his arms with blunt nails, bloodless wounds but they do sting. And he’s all scrunched up on one corner of his bed, even though clearly the whole thing’s his - you have your own just on the other side of the room. 

‘Course, you can’t judge. The reason you can read all those little tells so well is you had them on your own self not too long ago, and maybe not too long until. You’re not a mess, but you are a sack of problems. Drug problem, family problem, religion problem, reputation problem, staying-out-of-trouble problem. You take all these might-not-be-so-bad things and mess them all up, is what you do. It’s the only thing you’re good at, being a problem and making problems out of things. Like right now - that kid is gonna hate you, no matter what you do (because that’s what people do with you, it’s all they’ve ever done), and of course you’re going to make it easier for him. 

Some of the people you’ve met over the years, they’re real easy to sprawl all over. Not like you’re meaning to, but you honestly don’t give a fuck and if it makes things easier for you, well. So you test to see if he’s one of those fuckers, just to know what waters you’re getting yourself into later. You casually set one of your bags down on the corner of his bed - as nonchalant as any of your other movements, like you’re entitled to that little bit of space and he’s not using it anyway. 

And you don’t even have to wait a bit before his voice pipes up, crackling and hoarse: “Get your fucking shit off my bed.”

It’s a clear command and so you follow it. Always been good at following shit, you. Got you in plenty of trouble, but kept you out of plenty too. It’s fine if this brother isn’t down with you stepping on him - you can give people space.

-

It’s been a day, and you notice a little tiny difference in both him and you. 

You’d prodded at him a little over the next hours, introducing yourself and calling him shit like “brother” and “friend” to see if he’d object. Still set things down closer to him than you need, still edge into his space as far as you can get away with. And with every infraction he lifts his miserable head to yell at you, and you back off and wait and start the tip-toe dance all over again. 

It gives you something to do. 

You’re so good at following that you don’t even notice, at first, the little added extra orders on the end of his offended spiels (they’ve been getting longer, more eloquent, more entertaining). Things like how you look like a criminal with your rumpled clothes and smears of miscellaneous shit on your face from not washing for a few days, and then eventually things like “fucking get yourself cleaned up, god, it’s painful just laying my eyes on the pile of heinous shit that is my roommate” come tacked on at the end and you listen. You do the things he tells you to do, but only just. 

You are a little more than just barely living here - your paints are even unpacked, you haven’t touched those in ages - and your friendly little roommate is looking the tiniest bit more energetic now. 

After the first day, he hardly ever adds “leave me the fuck alone” into his rants anymore. 

-

It’s been a week, and things are definitely settling into a pattern. 

You’re not sure how to feel about the routine - you’ve never had anything you could rely on before, except your feel-good bad habits. But now you know you can come back to the room at the end of your classes, and he’ll be there sitting on his bed in the very very corner. He’s always there, because his classes finish before yours, and you’ve never seen him go out with friends or anything - does he even have anyone he knows, here? 

Whatever the reasons are, the consequence is that you spend more time awake with him than any other person, and even though the two of you don’t get along incredibly well you still learn about him in various indirect ways. You learn he can get really into his little shouty rambles, and he can do it on pretty much any subject but seems to enjoy it most when it has to do with speculation about interpersonal relations. Of course, he breaks off pretty rapidly when he sees you laughing and realizes what he’s doing, but it’s adorable as fuck the way he trails off and blushes the faintest bit. 

And, it seems, he learns about you. Mostly through watching - you can get your talkative on just as well as any other motherfucker, but you’ve learned how to make most of those words mean nothing at all, and to leave the rest for stating the obvious or nonsensical. The little dude’s more attentive than he looks, what with all his curled-up-in-a-corner ignoring everyone look, and odd facts about you make it into his rants. He complains about how you act off and unsettled whenever you don’t smell like terrible drugs, he whines about you pushing into his business and manages to insinuate an aside about never seeing you call your family, and he makes damn sure you’re eating and sleeping and cleaning yourself up. 

You’re not sure why he cares. 

You’re not sure why you care that he cares. You mean, you’ve had plenty nosy roommates before - a girl who wouldn’t stop meddling, stuck her nose everywhere until you just up and left her to sort out rent herself - but you don’t think you really mind this. It’s inobtrusive mostly, and it works. Your life is more together now than you can remember it ever being, and it surprises you so much that you accidentally answer one of his questions one evening. 

“… and what the fuck is even up with your self-care skills, they’re terrible! Like, even a fucking toddler hyped up on -”

“Ain’t never anyone taught me how,” you toss back, sort of quiet and casusal as anything until you notice it’s the truth. You’d been distracted by the latest task he put you on - to sort out your shit so you wouldn’t trip all over it trying to do anything, and would therefore get more done without the deterrent of landing on your face every time you tried. You freeze in panic, now, with a textbook in one arm and a plush goat keychain in the other. 

He makes a kind of  _oh_ sound, and then there is silence for a bit while you focus on making your back - the side facing him - look as relaxed and no-big-deal as you can while also standing completely still in terror. “Well, doesn’t mean you can’t be taught. We can start with your hair - there’s got to be fucking squirrels and rats nesting in it by now, I shudder to think of the cosmilogical horror that gave birth to that thing, I swear it has first-cousinly resemblance to a fucking eldritch abomination…”

You spent the night a little overwhelmed and with his hands and a brush pulling through your hair. His face is warm with embarrassment when you glance back.

-

It’s been a month. Somewhere along the line you learned that it was okay to tell him the truth, that he wouldn’t hold it over you to use in his complaints. And somewhere else he deigns you worthy of allowing into his space, but only when he allows it and not if you’re looking to hurt anything, like the moods you get yourself into occasionally now because he’s convinced you to slow ease off the drugs. 

It’s not been easy. But telling him things is better than holding them deep in some small corner of your soul, and he doesn’t say anything when you don’t want him to, and when he does speak up he says the right things to help. 

And you’ve taken to dragging him out of the room when he looks like he can handle it, when he’s in the kind of mood where he can’t hardly hide his tiny laughs at what you say. It’s easier to talk to people when he’s around, mostly because when he gets going with his wordsmithy he makes people laugh, and then they listen to you enough past what they’ve heard of you to laugh at your words, too, and you make a good handful of friends that way. 

Friends. You have friends now. 

Some nights you can even still his restless scratching and nervous biting without him swatting you away and closing you off. Some days you think you aren’t so much problems now, that maybe some part of you is  _good enough_  now and if you keep at it the rest will follow. 

The biggest change, though, is that Karkat smiles now, and you  _mean_ more of your own grins to match. 


	17. Thinkpan vs. Bloodpusher

No. No, no, no. This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening to you, to Gamzee, to the two of you right now. Not here, in the middle of the highway, out in the open when you weren’t expecting it and you’d been _so close to safety, to happiness._

Gamzee’s been bitten. Gamzee has less than a day, from your experience, before he turns into a mindless, shambling, flesh-seeking monster. Gamzee has a day before he dies. 

Your brain is refusing to process this, even when you lay it all out for yourself in simple terms: Gamzee is bleeding out purple from a nasty bite on the neck, in your shaking arms, and the smartest - most reasonable - thing to do is abandon him. You need to leave him out here like roadkill, like so much dead meat when even right now he’s still looking at you with blurry adoration, grasping at your hand with loose cold fingers and murmuring platitudes that you’ve repeated to him on nights neither of you could sleep - you need to leave him for dead when he’s still smiling and sincerely believing things will be all right, because his best friend is here to take care of him. 

Your heart is having no issues at all understanding, though, and so it’s already shattering and being crushed and demonstrating all kinds of ways it can be destroyed without you dying. You can’t choke back a sob, and you weakling you coward you hunch over him, trembling and tightening your arms around him even though you know he’s hurt, you’ll break him more if you’re not careful. 

“Hey, hey.” He’s looking worried now. Fucking idiot, always late catching on. “Karkat, brother -” He hangs on that word, between a “what’s wrong” and a “it’s okay”, just now realizing that neither of those are things that are appropriate to say. He breathes out very, very slowly, and he’s not reacting with panicked violence like the time you were nicked by a zombie claw and neither of you were sure if it meant turning. He’s taking this slow, he’s sinking into the truth of it with a cold calm you can’t find right now. 

“There’s that safehouse,” he starts, and you pause in your useless whimpering to listen. “There’s that place what we were all getting ourselves to go at. You gotta head there, you gotta get going before - before - gotta keep yourself safe, best friend, when I ain’t being able to no more.”

You scream at him, screech something like “no fucking way, not leaving you, not least until -” and you’re not even coherent but you get the point across anyway. You cling tighter even though it increases risk of infection, and despite his cracked ribs and sprained wrist and whatever the fuck else he clings back just as good. 

Gamzee’s the only one you have left. 

That thought sparks a whole new line of terror - what’s even the point if he dies, why do you need to save yourself if he’s not going to be there? And your thoughts split down across a line: leave him or stay with him.

If you leave him, you’ll live. You’re experienced, and you know the way and it’s not too far, even if the path there crosses some dangerous territory. If you leave him you’re almost damn certain you’ll survive for a while at least, and you can rest and eat and clean yourself up, all the things you’ve been hurting to do since forever ago. 

If you stay with him, you’ll die. Either you get attacked by another horde, staying out here in the open with no shelter in sight, or you’ll have to watch the long painful process as he turns and then he’ll probably eat you. If you stay, there is zero fucking percent chance of living, and you don’t know if you’re okay with that. 

He’s all you’ve got left. 

He takes a slow, shuddering breath in, and every second of watching him struggle is suffering. You don’t want to leave him, but you don’t want to die with him either. You want him to live; you want to live with him. 

“Sorry,” you say as you shift and he winces. “Are your legs okay? Can you walk?" 

He looks at you, pain adding to his confusion open on his face. "Yeah. Yeah, why?”

“We’re going together. We’re going to walk every miserable fucking mile to that safehouse, and we are going to see if the shitheads there have a cure, and if they don’t we will demand one or make one ourselves in the time we’ve got left.” It’s a ridiculously optimistic approach, but you see his approval shine in his eyes. 

“I’ll fight it,” he promises. “I’ll fight it for you, best friend.” His grin is as unguarded and trusting as the day you met him, his hands up and your gun up. You love him so much. 

“Good. No one else is dying on my watch.” You set your shoulder against him in support, and the two of you start slow, painful steps forward. 


	18. Silence

After the game ends, you refuse to face what’s happened. Everything’s kind of blurry, on what you did wrong and what you didn’t do, or what you did that wasn’t wrong, and no one else seems to know for sure either. You don’t want to face any more questions, any more disgusted looks, any more wondering if all that is your fault - so you run away instead. 

It’s not difficult, leaving. That isn’t the hard part. You just up and leave, because no matter how vigilant people are there are still eight kids and twenty-four trolls, and if they need their own space and time it’s not reasonable for any one person to know where everyone is at all times. So you slip away, and everyone assumes Karkat’s got you and Karkat assumes at least one of the others will know where you went, or that you’d go back eventually like a faithful puppy. No one has reason to think you’d leave, because mostly they have other, more important things to think about. 

And that’s fine. That’s all fine. You learn how to live in this new world you’ve helped create, what is acceptable and what you can get away with (it turns out most things are, and being alone and closed off is definitely one of them). You keep yourself moving around, even though just one city is big enough to hide you if you wanted. You stay alive and mostly well. You don’t even slip into any of your old habits again. 

One thing, though, is not all right. At first you couldn’t tell what was missing. You think you’ll get used to it, the lack of having anyone near who understands what happened, but that turns out to not be the issue at all. You’re missing noise. Silence is eating away at you, and it’s only right after you figure out who you’re missing that you realize which part of you is having a hole worn into it by lack of sound. 

It’s your diamond. The metaphorical one, at least - whatever it is that represents Karkat. (Some days your chest hurts, and some days it’s your head when there’s no one there to keep you from thinking yourself in circles, and some days it’s just everything at once.)

You do odd jobs and errands for money in silence. You buy food in silence. A little old lady nods at you in greeting, and you nod back - the entire exchange makes up most of your social interaction for the day, and it’s all done in silence. You stalk down the street with your hands in your pockets, eyes on the ground and with nowhere to go. You eat alone and in silence. One night you catch yourself rambling to thin air just to fill the goddamned  _silence_ , and you realize you can’t take it anymore. 

There’s nothing else for it. You go searching. 

He’s living in this nice sort-of-urban city part, with a good number of trolls and humans. The ones who could stand staying still, anyway. They’re the ones who could handle adjusting, or value their friendships over other things, or who are waiting for someone they need to return. After a bit of lurking, because you need more information and because you’re scared (mostly that second one), you come to the conclusion that Karkat’s living in the apartment third from the end of the building most of them are in, and that you should go sooner rather than later in case you talk yourself out of it. 

A morning one year and a half after the game ended, you lay your feet in scruffy sneakers on the steps in front of his door, and get caught between knocking and ringing the doorbell. That one decision has you stuck on what to do next for a good five minutes, another excuse for not doing what you came to do, and in the end you’re about to turn away to try tomorrow when the door swings open violently. 

You stand there frozen and stare at him staring at you. He hasn’t changed much, except his always-running mouth is hanging open right now - your world is still in silence up until he gathers himself up so he’s standing tall as he can, and draws in a sharp, loud breath. Even something that gentle and everyday he can make explosive, and you didn’t know how much you’d missed that until now. 

You don’t get a chance to dwell on nostalgia, though. His hand flies out from his side and gets you right across the face, and it’s not hard enough to make you stagger or anything but it stings enough to shock words out of you first. 

“Fuck,” you breathe, “brother, what in the -”

“You!” Suddenly he’s all in your space, hand that hit you clenched so tight on the front of your shirt you’re afraid he’ll break his fingers. “You, how dare you, how fucking  _dare_ you come back here after a year and seven fucking months, after we all thought you were  _dead_ , fuck you! None of us knew why you left, we thought it was one of the assholes from in the game, got to you again, and we worried for a solid two months before someone mentioned it might be your usual cryptic fuckery, and -” He takes a breath here, finally, you’d been worried. 

“Karkat -”

“And do you know how fucking. How worried I was? Nobody knows how to adjust to a completely new life, least of all you, and I looked! I looked for you up and fucking down the city and then the nearby ones and you aren’t even a fucking void player how dare you be so hard to find, I -” He breaks off again, and this time for sniffing back a sob. 

“Sorry,” you manage. He lifts his head - eyes blazing and red-rimmed - and you make to step back but he flings himself at you so hard it takes you a moment to even realize that it’s a hug. 

He’s still mumbling invectives into your chest, and you laugh the lightest you have in months because the air all around you is filled with those protective words, and you missed this so much. 


	19. Romcom

Another day at the counter of this tiny coffee shop, and you think you might explode. There’s nothing wrong with the shop itself - cozy little thing, warm lights and delicious aroma - or most of the patrons. People here tend to keep to themselves, and you have no trouble handing them their drinks in silence because you get paid either way, and niceties are exhausting.

No, there’s nothing really wrong with most of the clientele, but you really have to emphasize “most”. Because there is one guy who comes in every single day, blinks owlishly at the menu like he can’t read, trips over something, and leaves. Honestly, you have a heavy suspicion he’s constantly stoned, and you want nothing to do with him. But he’s there every day, all odd hours and once when you’d already closed up and were trying to leave. And it’s part of your job to shoo away the people loitering for free internet or whatever, and so every time he stays past the first fifteen minutes you have to heave a heavy sigh, stomp out from behind the counter, and wave your hand in front of his face until he looks at you.

Really, the words you use in those instances probably make up half the things you say every day. He never says anything back, though - soon as you get to the “you really gotta leave, man, I mean fucking really why are you always here if you don’t buy anything and then not expect to be kicked out?” part of your rant, he turns and leaves without a word.

Today, and you’re not sure why, something’s different. It’s a slower day, with about a handful of people coming in as a handful trickle out, and so you have time to observe that his eyes are a little clearer than usual. He still just stands there, though, and you watch the clock tick its minute hand past the six and wait for him to leave.

He doesn’t, of course. You sigh again, move again, and make to start the usual waving-and-talking-loudly routine when he turns and looks you in the eyes. You’re forced to stop for a moment - he’s never done that before - and hope the whole staring-into-his-eyes thing won’t be taken the wrong way by anyone watching. “Are you going to buy anything?”

“Uh, yeah, sure,” he answers, to your surprise, and fumbles in his pockets for money. “What’s all there motherfucking to buy here?”

“Well, this is a coffee shop. There are a few other things, though, if you don’t want that - hot chocolate, muffins -”

“Oo, hot chocolate! Please,” he adds on, as belated sheepish afterthought. He shoves a few coins at you, and you take them to count on your way back behind the counter. He trails close behind and leans all over the front of the counter, elbows going every which way. In the minute or two it takes for you to make the chocolate, his gaze doesn’t leave you for a moment. You’re not sure whether or not to feel creeped out - he still has that lazy slow-blinking thing going on, and he could just be spacing out in your direction for all you know.

When you hand it to him, along with his change, his hand twitch-shakes a little and suddenly hot liquid all down your shirt and on the floor. You hiss and step back out of reflex, but you slip on the warm puddle forming and go down ungracefully. “Shit. Fuck. Ow.”

He’s rambling apologies at you, hands held out in front of him like he doesn’t know what to do with them, and then as soon as he sees you fall he’s vaulting over the counter. What he failed to consider was the fact that there was also delicious drink all over the surface he’s trying to get over, and so he tumbles straight off it and lands nearly in your lap.

“Whoops. Shit.”

“Ohhh my god.” You bury your face in your hands, and then prompty un-bury it when you remember that your hands are sticky-sweet still. “Thank fuck it was only just hotter than lukewarm! What were you thinking, if you weren’t up for holding it I could have slid it over to you instead or something - and you’re not even allowed back here, employees only, look at the fucking sign!” You vaguely register that you probably shouldn’t be scolding a customer like he’s a misbehaved puppy, but you can’t help it. You have hot chocolate in your shoes.

And he’s laughing. You’d say it’s a nice sound if you weren’t so preoccupied with grumbling until you’re blue in the face to notice. He’s bent over laughing with his hair tickling your face and mumbling reassurances like “Come on, brother, ain’t so bad as to motherfucking glue us to the floor” or “S'okay, weren’t being all that thirsty anyway”. Once he’s settled down enough to uncurl himself, he starts patting at you, presumably to stop your still-endless stream of complaints, palms sticking to your shirt, your face, your hair.

You find you don’t mind this as much as you should. Still, you make an attempt to pretend you do by shoving lightly at his shoulder. “Come on, ease up, get off me you enormous useless lump. Great help you fucking were helping me get back up.”

He just grins at you. You scowl back. A few seconds of this pass, and then he wraps his arms all around you. “Thanks, brother. All cheered up now.”

“I hadn’t realized that was my intention,” you grumble back, but you’re awkwardly patting him on the back of the head as you say it, so it doesn’t really have the intended effect. “Seriously though, we should get up. I’m working.”

“Can’t,” he tells your shoulder, nose squashed into it. “Too sticky.”


	20. Warmth

You put your head down and run, through puddles and the raindrops clinging to your face, and you hope to all the gods you know that your dad won’t think to find you here, blocks and blocks away from your house in a dark alleyway. He hadn’t been expecting you to run away at all, which is fair because you hadn’t either. You just kind of up and did it. It was the sudden realization of “I’m not happy here” and the rush of fear when you’d heard the door slamming (means he’s home, means he’s angry) that did it. You got up, got out the window, and ran. 

It’s been - how long? Ten minutes, twenty? An hour? Surely not that long, your brain says, but your wet heavy limbs disagree. You don’t think you can run any longer. Trudge along in the freezing night, maybe, but that isn’t the greatest plan. Well, there is an open window there. And the worst thing that could happen from going in that window can’t be any worse than how angry you dad will be when he catches you. 

Shaking fingers curl over the window sill, and up you go, tumbling through the opening and onto a damp carpet. (Who the hell leaves their window open in a rainstorm? You mean, you would probably, but who the hell else?) It takes a second for you to blink the water and hair out of your eyes, to look up and around the dimly-lit bedroom. And, oh hell, it is a bedroom and there is someone in the room staring at you with wide, disbelieving eyes. You get that - you’d be staring at yourself too, if you weren’t you. 

You hold up a hand, give it the tiniest wave. “Hey.”

He keeps staring. You stare back, because you’re not sure what else to do. He has a mop of hair shorter and messier than yours, and big, angry eyes and overall he looks like the kind of person who doesn’t care their carpet’s wet, unlike you who wouldn’t notice. Somewhere between all the staring, you notice you’re shivering. Really hard, actually. Enough for your teeth to click together, despite how quiet you’re trying to be. 

(Quiet is always good, in any situation. It means  _i’m not here, don’t mean no harm_.)

“Okay, what the fuck,” he says, and you guess that’s a reasonable response. You grin, which probably isn’t a reasonable response. Somebody’s gotta balance things out, right?

“Hi. Sorry. Uh, could I just get to be hiding out here in your wicked living quarters for a bit, like? Just ‘til the storm passes. Sorry." 

He frowns. 

You’re about to say something else, like maybe apologize for dripping everywhere even though his carpet’s wet already, when a door slams somewhere across the street and you jump out of your skin with a terrified little whimper.  _He’s coming he’s coming_  you shake yourself out of it and draw your elbows in, knees in, take up less space. "Please?”

He frowns harder, but it’s a different frown. Different than your old man’s, that’s for certain. (He mostly smiles, actually, your father. Smiles all harsh and delighted like he ain’t mad as fuck that you’re existing.)

You sneeze. 

He sighs, explosive like the rest of him, and stands up. “Okay, come here. You’re going to catch a cold, I’ll try and dig up some clothes that fit.” You stare at his offered hand like it’s a tiny-ass whale or some other such thing that you aren’t expecting. “What?”

“Sorry!” You startle a little, take his hand, and let yourself be pulled up. “Uh. Thank you.”

He smiles, and you forget all the cold that was ever in you because  _wow_. 

A few minutes later, you are warmer and cozier than you have ever been in your life, and he’d been reluctant to let you invade his personal space with hugs until you’d started shivering and sneezing again. Then he breathes a fond sigh, mutters some profanity, and draws you into a couch. His feet are curled around your ankles, and your arms are around his torso, and everything is warmth. 

“Mmnnurgh,” you say, trying to lift your head and failing. “Tell me a story?” You remember, through your foggy sleepiness, of asking your mom to do that. Haven’t seen her in years, wonder what happened. 

He snorts, but doesn’t refuse. “Trade you for whatever had you end up here. Sounds like interesting circumstances.” He’s trying to sound like he just wants entertainment, but you think you see a little worry between his eyebrows and in the corners of his mouth. You’re not bothered by that, though, because mmn so warm. 

“Okay, deal.”


	21. Claws or Fangs

One evening, you wake to claws catching at your skin and teeth snapping too close to your face for comfort. You’re the type to wake up all in a flash, tense-muscles wide-eyed-alert in an instant, because it’s what’s helped you not get killed so far. Your brain catches up to the situation just in time to stop your reflex to attack whatever-it-is right back, because you’re in your hive, in your recuperacoon, and there shouldn’t be anything wrong because you remember falling asleep cuddled up to your moirail. 

The moirail who is currently snarling and trying to tear you apart is maybe an issue. He’s still caught in the throes of some dayterror, but his eyes are wide open so it’s his tendency to wake all slow and lazy that’s become his downfall tonight. You try to catch his flailing hands, to reach at his face, and that earns you a few extra cuts and one bite, neatly centered on your shoulder. You hiss and curse and snap at him, and when he pulls back - jaws wide open in a threat display fangs painted in your red - you slap him. 

He yelps, voice cracking high and eyes widening in surprise instead of fury, and when he comes back to himself all he does is curl back in on himself, skinny bony spine pressed up against the curve of your ‘coon. He doesn’t meet your eyes, even when you snarl all irritated at him to  _look at you damnit_  - he pulls himself up out and doesn’t look at you for the entire evening, for the entire night. 

Another evening, you’re telling off some asshole who showed up at your front door and wouldn’t leave you alone. He’s brownblooded, from around here, and not anyone you know. He’s heard  _rumours_ , see, and thought the best idea is clearly to go straight up to your door and knock until he wakes you up. He’s stupidly rambly and dodges the point like a pro, and you have the vaguest notion he might be pitchflirting with you but you’re not sure and you do not want to deal with this shit right now, okay. 

Your shoulders are all hunched up to your ears and every single one of your teeth is showing, and the only thing holding you back from just ripping him a new one, physically, with your claws, is the reminder that that would be reciprocation, and the last thing you want is to be quadranted up with this guy. 

So maybe Gamzee is justified in trying to shoosh you, maybe you’re in need of a little pacification so you don’t murder somebody, but all you can think of when his voices pipes up all slow and drawling “brothers, motherfucking both of you might as want to discuss this what all civilly?” is that he’s mediating, doing something ashen where it’s not wanted nor needed (you have the darker quadrants on the brain, so what, sue you). 

Your excuse - no excuses you shitty bulgewipe worst moirail worst troll ever - is that you’re already angry, and the instigator of the anger is still standing there with apparently no regrets whatsoever, and that definitely (does not) justify you whipping around and laying into your moirail. 

At least the brownblood gets the hint that maybe it’s not the best time to do this when your claws open three long lines on Gamzee’s forearm, trailing purple blood through the air, and the asshole absconds straight back to wherever the fuck he came from. Your anger, however, stays. And the only direction it can go in is forward, and by the time you realize what you’re doing Gamzee’s broken apart in a dozen different places, cool blood dripping from your claws. Your snarl stutters to a stop, and your lips twitch around your bared teeth, and suddenly you don’t know anything - where do your hands go, what do you do, what can you do when your moirail is bleeding and you’re the reason?

Like the coward you are, you turn tail and hide in your block with the door locked for the remainder of the night. 

Yet another evening, you and Gamzee are reduced to screaming at each other over something stupid. You can hardly remember what it was, afterwards, but you do know that this has been happening more and more often, and you know that the pale quadrant isn’t the fighting quadrant. Something’s gone wrong, somewhere along the line, and you don’t know how you can fix it. 

You also can’t remember who throws the first punch - all you know is it does come to blows, and every time you land a hit it feels wrong, wrong, wrong. He claws up your face, goes for your neck with his fang all bared; you tear your knuckles apart trying to break him into pieces, and for all that you try, you think he hurts himself more trying to hurt you than all the damage you do added together. 

You slow eventually, inevitably, winding down from the fear and anger and mindless violence that drove you forward in the first place, and when you stop fighting he does too. The two of you lie on your respiteblock floor for a small eternity, just breathing and bleeding. And again: slowly, eventually, inevitably, Gamzee moves to pick up all the pieces of him all over you and goes without looking at you to clean himself up. 

This time, though, you stop him. You fingers close around his wrist - no claws, no claws - and you say, softly, “Wait. Gamzee, wait.”

He waits, turns, doesn’t look at you. 

“I’m sorry.” And then, after a pause, “Can we talk?”

And of course he says  _yes, best brother yes of course_  and you do talk it out. You eviscerate the previously-avoided topic of hurting each other with him, and finally, finally, you sort things out.


	22. Memories

You and Karkat have been dead long enough to get used to it. You’re from one of the timelines that ended stupidly - everyone either messed up and died in preventable ways or were forced to wait for the end in a session that was wasting away. At least you followed Karkat almost right away, into the enemy battle that was a bit too much for the two of you at your levels. At least it wasn’t any of your friends who caused it.

Wandering the dreambubbles, you’ve seen your fair share of alternate selves. Dreaming or dead, alpha or doomed. You leave your hand firmly in Karkat’s to prevent your wounds from bubbling up (you let go for one second one moment and turn back and he’s gone all the way over there where you can’t help) because, even though you can’t die from them, they get in the way too often.

Right now, the two of you are in a bubble that looks like the meteor - you’ve never seen it, not when you were alive, but it’s been a pretty common theme for your alpha selves’ memories. Whoever’s dreaming this either doesn’t realize they’ve fallen asleep, or they’re just too tired to bother summoning up something prettier. Not a happy moment in the timeline, either way.

You and your moirail creep up closer to where you can hear small snuffling noises. The moment you catch sight of tiny horns, you switch Karkat’s hand to your other one and make him stay around the corner. It tends to upset the other Karkats, you’ve noticed, when they don’t want to be dreaming and they see themselves all dead like that. And so it falls to you to poke your head ever-so-slowly around the bend to see what this not-yours Karkat is up to.

Other Karkat is swiping furiously at his eyes, like he does when he’s trying to stop crying, and you hear scraps of muttered anger: “said it was forever, fucking liar” and “fine finefine was going to break up with him anyway” and “stupid pious self-righteous smug bastard” and you can start to guess what happened. Your Karkat squeezes your hand questioningly, but you shake your head - explain later. The poor thing likely cried himself asleep, and you want so badly to shoosh him down, but he’s not yours to calm.

Then he lifts his head in alarm, sees you standing there and tenses up all over. You blink your dead-white eyes at him, to make sure he knows it’s not his clown running away from him, and abscond with yours to leave him to his misery.

The next dreambubble you enter is a little brighter, but the smell of blood doesn’t leave any room for misconception that this is a happy memory. Tall horns curve from behind the crest of a hill, and faint broken noises can be heard, increasingly panicked and hysterical. You hear your own voice, calling “Karkat” and “please, no, don’t leave” over and over again, and you’re afraid of what you’re going to find on the other side of that hill.

Yours squeezes your hand, reminds you that he’s still there, and so you take a breath and let him lead you around to where your alternate self clings to a Karkat stabbed twice through the chest and smelling slightly singed. They don’t look like they’re from the same timelines - Other Gamzee still has his wiggler sign-shirt on, clean looping purple through black and not stained with any kind of blood (just started the game, then), but Other Karkat looks a little older even than yours, and he’s yelling something about purple codpieces.

“Hey. Hey, what’s going on?” Your Karkat marches up all righteous and stares both of them down. You hang back and watch him walk them through their accounts of recent events - Gamzee’s recently deceased, and only recently lost his own version of Karkat, and a little lost from grief; Karkat’s come from some clusterfuck of a timeline where Gamzee dropped him in lava after attacking Terezi, and basically everyone’s dead. It doesn’t sound like a very nice timeline.

“Well. Okay. You handle your own problem,” Your Karkat tells his counterpart. “Just don’t wander too close to any Vriskas, they’re doing something dangerous.” He turns to the Gamzee. “These are dreambubbles. Prospit’s still okay, right? Yeah, okay, you go off and wander ‘til you find your Karkat.” He pats him fondly on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, you’ve got all the time in the world.”

The next bubble is somewhere warm and indoors. You haven’t seen this setting before, and that unsettles you before you remember you’re already dead, and so there’s not much that could hurt you now. So you feel Karkat steel himself beside you, and step into the hallway to walk toward the only lit room. You can hear rain through the walls, and there is the smell of something cooking; muffled laughter drifts toward you, and you wonder where and when this is.

When you enter the kitchen, it looks like some sort of party/reunion is going on. Living and dead players sit and stand in clusters, chattering, and one bubbly human sweeps past cooing at your joined hands. You try on a tentative smile, letting it slide back into the place it used to always sit, and Karkat’s grip on your fingers loosens just a little. Someone else pushes you toward another hallway, and you go along with the momentum into a respiteblock where it looks like a pair of your alternate selves are having themselves a feelings jam.

After the initial embarassment wears off, stammering apologies and all, you notice something that prompts some kind of hopeful feeling: they’re alive. They’re alive and looking significantly happier than anyone else you’ve come across today, and your other self smiles at you when he sees you gaping.

“Yeah. We’re okay. Sit down, we can get our talk on.” And when you do, the knowledge that things turned out all right in at least one timeline, for at least one set of Karkat and Gamzee, comforts you enough that you dare to let go of Karkat’s hand.

Nothing terrible happens, for once.


	23. Laughter

It is three in the goddamned morning, and you are nowhere near ready for your exam tomorrow. Fuckdamnit. You sigh and settle your head in your hands, scritching anxiously at your temples. You’re tired enough that you won’t be retaining any information, no matter how hard you try, but there isn’t anything to do but try and study anyway. You yawn and stretch, preparing for another round of staring at walls of text, and then someone taps you on the shoulder. 

You start, cutting your yawn off halfway. Standing next to you with his hand still outstretched from getting your attention is a boy who looks to be about your age, with his hair all messy curls and his teeth looking a little too big for his mouth. You’re about to demand what the fuck is he doing, but in the time it takes to get your exhaustion-slowed thoughts together he’s beaten you to the chase. 

“Hey, brother. Uh. A motherfucker was all what wondering if you’d have a dollar on your person, so’s I can get at borrowing it? Only, up and forgot to eat between studying and I might get to passing out any moment now.”

You blind, processing his ramble. “Oh. Oh, sure, fuck. I should have a granola bar or something here, one second. Sit down,” you command, waving one hand at him while the other rummages through your bag. You come up with a muffin, falling to pieces in your hand from being crushed under three textbooks. 

“Thanks,” he manages to say before half the muffin occupies his mouth. “Woulda been  _crumb_ -y without you here to get your help on,” he adds through a mouthful of muffin, snickering and spraying said crumbs all over you. 

You can’t help it, you’re tired. You crack a tiny grin and go, “ _Muffin_ quite like accosting strangers at ass o'clock in the morning for food, is there? Hope you don’t do this too  _oven_.”

“You’re all  _baking_ my life a whole lot easier,” he admits. God, these are awful. And he missed a whole wheat opportunity in there somewhere, you just know it. 

“Just glad we didn’t add fainting to the  _mix_ , nobody’d want to haul your terrible fucking pun-making corpse to the nurse’s.”

“Who put a  _chip_ on your shoulder?” He presents a chocolate chip via sticking his tongue out, and waggles one eyebrow just because. 

“I swear, if you make me  _dessert_ my notes entirely tonight I will  _beat_ your eggs.” Okay, that made no sense whatsoever. You crack another yawn. (Oh no,  _crack_ , even your inner monologuing is in on it.)

“Choco _late_  me help,” he says, and proceeds to very deliberately shift all your papers into the shape of a muffin. You sit and watch him do it with a vague sense of surreality. 

“No,  _dough_ n’t - I’m gonna -”  _yawn_ “going to punch you in the neck. And then elbow you in the guts for good  _measure_.” Pun-threat combo, see how he’ll top that.

“Fighting in the library’s up and being a  _recipe_ for disaster, bro, don’t be too  _pastry_ with your decisions,” he complains. “At  _yeast_ we can take it outside.”

“You want to fight? ‘Cause we can fucking fight.” You’ve run out of puns, so clearly trying to jump up and take an intimidating stance is the next best option. Instead you somehow end up sprawled on your back across his knees. Oh, is that your foot in the loop of your backpack strap? That explains… something. Yeah. 

You tilt your head to look up at him, and he stares very seriously back. “ _Knead_ a hand, brother?”

You last all of twenty seconds before you start shaking with helpless fatigue-fueled laughter. It’s a library, you have to be quiet, but you can’t seem to stop. It doesn’t help that he joins in, and then it’s just an endless feedback loop of entirely pointless laughter. 

It’s nice, though. Even though your midsection aches by the time you stop, and a few nearby students are shooting you dirty looks, it was really nice to unwind for a bit. You try getting off his lap, but your stomach muscles are having none of that, so you stay and chat. 

It turns out he’s actually decent at academics - you wouldn’t think it by looking at him and hearing him talk, but he is; it’s just the remembering to do it part he has trouble with. And remembering to eat, and remembering where his dorm is, and a bunch of other things besides. The guy’s a mess. 

“Fine, okay.” You have reached a conclusion. Decisions made at four in the morning are always fantastic. “You wanna be study buddies? I’ll help remind you to do things, you try explaining some of this bullshit for me.”

“Deal,” he answers almost immediately. He offers a fist. 

You go to reluctantly bump it, and you miss. It’s a while until you both calm down enough from the ensuing hysterics to actually study. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Credit to Tumblr user cloud9is007 for many of the puns!


	24. Coming Back

You wake up on his doorstep, and immediately dive into the bushes. 

You’ve been doing this and similar for the past week, now. It’s been one week since you broke up with Karkat, and you hardly think it’s a coincidence. You’ve always had a problem with sleepwalking, and with not addressing issues with your emotions, and you suppose those two things combined to screw you over even more. 

The thing is, you don’t think it’s an unaddressed issue. In fact, it’s more of an addressed one, and you honestly believe you made the right choice. You were bad for him; you caused trouble for him and made him angrier than he usually is and made him cry, made him worry and you’d just decided you don’t deserve him and left a note and left. You’re a burden on him, and he’ll be happier now - as soon as he gets over trying to talk to you, looking for you and texting you. It’s just because he still thinks of you as his responsibility. He’ll realize you’re not anymore, soon, and he’ll be happy then. 

Your subconscious has decided that you are straight-up wrong. The dreams are hardly subtle - your happy moments with him, his face when he looks at you doing something harmless and stupid, what he looks like half-asleep and fumbling. You miss him, sure, but this isn’t about your feelings. It’s about what’s best for Karkat, and it’s not like he doesn’t have other friends to lean on. It’s for him, for him, has become your mantra for getting through days where you ache and don’t see a point to eating or getting out of bed. 

(You try to ignore the voices in your head going “no, it’s for you it’s for you being selfish” and “the relationship was a mess, sure, but you’re the one who decided it was too much of a mess to bother sorting out” and “you gave up, you lazy selfish fuck”.)

You’ve woken up at his window, at his door. Found yourself wandering the places you used to walk with him, hanging around where you know he likes to go. You were nearly caught more than a handful of times, but you run fast and you disappear like it’s a talent you’ve perfected, so he’s never actually gotten within shouting range of you (which is impressive, because your boy can  _shout_ ). And now you’re crouched in his nice bush and ruining the branches. You can’t ever do anything nicely, can you?

The next day you wake up with leaves in your hair and your back fucked up from sleeping on the couch, and scratches all up your arms from the branches, and you decide going back to sleep is a good choice. Maybe you just won’t ever get up off this couch again. Karkat will never find you then. 

You dream of your first date. It’s spring, and everything is warm, and the two of you go birdwatching in the park. Look, a crow. A seagull. Another crow. You’re both laughing and enjoying yourselves much more than you have the right to be with only two kinds of bird to look at, and then you’re tripping and he’s picking leaves out of your hair and scolding you for your skinned knees. Eventually you just settle up all cuddled together on one of the benches under a nice tree, dappled sunlight and shadow spreading over the two of you and making you forget whose skin is whose. 

You doze off in the dream, and so when you feel someone shaking your shoulder you wonder why Karkat’s not asleep too, and then you wonder why it’s so cold. 

“You fucking idiot, what gave you the notion it was a good idea to sleep on a park bench in the middle of winter? And don’t think I’ll forgive you just because I remember why this particular bench, either - you’ve caught a cold, I can see snot dribbling down that mess of a face, and speaking of that have you not been fucking eating?” His complaints are a constant stream of quiet muttered fondness, and you feel like you’re home for the first time in a week. 

A week. You sit bolt upright and nearly knock Karkat in the nose with your head. And then you sneeze, and before you have time to finish putting a possible sequence of events together in your head he’s talking at you again. Much louder, too, because now he means for you to hear him. 

“Gamzee Makara, who the fuck gave you the right to be so good at hiding? Do you know how worried I was? An entire week, and if it wasn’t for the glimpses I kept catching I would have thought you were dead! And don’t you start on that spiel about not deserving my worry, I’ve heard it before and disagreed with it before and you have a cold now and need a cup of hot chocolate.”

That sounds so nice right now, and that’s how you know you’re not allowed to have it. “No, go away, I broke up with you you can’t make me go back,” you sleep-mumble, and then you sneeze again. “I don’t want to go back.” You try to say this assertively, but he just sighs in his fond way again and tugs on your arm. 

“If you really didn’t want to, then why did you keep coming back? Sometimes I think your subconscious has more sense than you do, honestly. Come on. We can talk when you’re warm, and I promise to listen and address whatever problems you’re having without dismissing them as "Gamzee, you’re being a self-loathing idiot again”, okay?“

You really can’t argue with that. 


	25. Strength

This is bad. This is a very bad situation you are in right now, and you are absolutely panicking and that is not good also. You force yourself to take a deep breath. Hyperventilating will not help your moirail any, Karkat, and if you breathe too loud the guards might hear you. Right. That’s it - just slink on over across this row of cells, peek in to check there’s no one in them, and move on to the next. 

You find Gamzee in one of the last rows you have left to look - of course, given your luck - sitting loosely on the ground and hardly looking concerned at all. He jumps when you hiss “hey” at him, though - you see a few spots swelling purple from the guards or drones shoving him around. When he sees you, he presses himself up against the bars so you can whisper at each other without being heard by anyone else. 

“You here to break me out, brother?” His tone is resigned but grateful. “Can’t. Motherfucking tried, I did, but they’re all highblood-strength resistant and whatnot.” He smiles a forgiving smile at you, and you are so goddamned angry. 

You slump. That was actually your first plan - forcibly somehow get him out with sheer force of will. But examining the door and the cell, now, it’s clearly not possible with what you have available to you. “Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. I can’t do anything right. No lock-picking skills, no tricking the guards, and all I’ve got left are puny lowblood-mutant arms and a pair of sickles to off myself with.” You push ineffectively at the bars to prove your point. 

The reason he’s even in here is your fault, too. Your rebellion, your mess-up, your moirail being shipped off to serve in the empress’ fleet. The only reason he isn’t dead, too, is because he shares a sign with the Grand Highblood, and they’re thinking they can train him out of what you “coerced him into believing”, because apparently purplebloods being prone to beliefs directly translates to “they can’t think for themselves”. 

“Hey, no, brother shhh.” He slides a hand through between the bars and lays it on your elbow. “S'okay. You’re some kind of firey miracle, you, leader rebellions all and using all of yourself to help other trolls - from your blood to your spirit, okay, you’re strong enough to live on without me." 

You snarl at him and his cheesy bullshit. You know what he’s planning because he told you once, after a close call in battle - he said if they ever captured him he’d escape and die trying so they wouldn’t get any information out of him, "no motherfucking good at secrets you know me”, and he’d laughed and you’d scolded him for making you imagine that. You’re shaking, now, because that reality is much, much closer now than it had been then, and if you’d nearly cried then you’re not sure if you can keep quiet enough now. 

“Fuck your romantic flattery,” you tell him, straining your voice to keep it under audible levels. “You’re right, I am strong, in fucking spirit or whatever it was you said - that means I’m strong enough to survive until I get you the fuck back beside me, and mow down every single person who stands in my way. So you owe it to me to not try anything stupid until I get there, you got that?”

He laughs a watery laugh and tilts his grin a little more to the truly happy side. You, meanwhile, have tears in your eyes and a trembling chin like a goddamned wiggler. “Got it, brother, understood you loud and clear. That’s a good plan, too. S'a reason why you’re the leader with the planning and shit and not me.”

“Okay,” you manage, “yeah. Promise?” And fuck it, there’s no one looking so you can be as idiotic as you want: you hold out two fingers in a half-diamond shape up at him. 

He touches his clawtips to yours and whispers “promise”. And you allow yourself a good minute of sniffling before you have to force yourself to leave. 


	26. Rebellion

You are a good subjugglator-in-training. You are the best, in fact, if your ancestor is to be believed - he’s not one for favouritism, so you’re inclined to think of his praise as credible. You kill everyone messily on your training missions, you’re clever enough to know when you’re getting underfoot, and you’ve even sniffed out the odd rebel or two for him to execute. The Grand Highblood is very fond of you indeed. 

Of course, that doesn’t mean you like him very much. He’s awe-inspiring, and strong, and respected by everyone on the ship. You think you would have liked him if you had never known Karkat, hadn’t heard the few lines of rebellious logic he spewed at you in-game - you think you would have found your ancestor funny and amazing and a good role model to look up to if everything he does didn’t inspire a pang of loss from “Karkat wouldn’t approve, but Karkat’s dead and not here to stop him”. You’re trying your best to forget that, as far as you know, Karkat was culled for being a mutant the moment the game dumped you all right in the middle of all the Conscription Day kids and drones. You weren’t there to see, but luck only gets you so far.

Trying not to remember Karkat leads to you doing some really stupid things, though. One of them being: when you wake up one evening and you’re actually given the option, this time, of standing in for the Grand Highblood while he goes look fancy and intimidating at court proceedings or whatever - when the messenger says you can choose to interrogate a rebel for him or decline and let him do it tomorrow, you say yes. 

It’s only because yesternight hadn’t gone very well - slip-ups one after another and a vague headache haunting you the entire time - and you thought, well, stress relief. ( _Every troll is a person_ , he’d said to you one midday when you both couldn’t sleep.  _Every person deserves to not hurt, so why the fuck does the empire, the game, everyfuckingthing else in the entire fucking universe forget this? Is it that hard?_ ) Just a little stress relief. 

So you stroll down to get locations of rebel headquarters out of this poor sucker who had the misfortune to be caught by the subjugglators instead of the legislacerators, and they say since it’s short notice and usually GHB who uses that room, there aren’t any cameras or bugs to keep track of the inside from the outside. Behave, they tell you, and you shurg and see no problems in your near future. 

You open the door and this is what you see: chained to the table, looking extremely fucking pissed off at everything in general, is your Karkat Vantas, little mutant rebel who really has the worst, most terrible luck. You see him raise his head with a snarl and an insult already poised at the tip of his tongue, and you see him stop dead at seeing you stopping dead. 

The you from before you spent perigees and perigees thinking your moirail was dead and believing to the core of your bones that this violent life was going to be yours for hundreds of sweeps - that you would have stood there gaping and maybe hugged him or something, with the door still wide open for all the other good empress-fearing trolls to see. The you now slowly shuts the door, locks it, and plunks your ass down in the chair opposite him before you even dare say anything. 

You’re filled with a sudden, terrible fear that the you now would have actually tortured him if you didn’t know there’s no surveillance in the room, hurt him just for your own safety. 

You, big bad subjuggulator trainee you, who’s killed more trolls in the past perigee than you from before knew the names of, you break down into ugly sobs and curl up in your too-big chair because you’re afraid to touch him in this room with its history of blood and pain. You’re getting purple all over your fancy uniform. 

“Oh no oh goddamnit you big wiggler,” he gets out, but his voice is wavering under all the fond annoyance, “fuck, stop that, stop - if you’re not going to interrogate me at least show some measure of dignity you’re embarassing subjugglators everywhere -” And it’s that weird mix of “not sure if supposed to be acting like I don’t know you” and “cannot possibly hold back all this emotion, fuck it” and you break out into hysterical cackles. 

“No, no we’re fine no cameras no bugs,” you manage to get out, and he’s still looking concerned like he’s not sure whether to believe you or question your information-gathering competence. “Grand Highblood’s room,” you clarify, and finally he relaxes. 

By the time he finally manages to calm you down - difficult maneuvers, what with all his limbs cuffed down to a table that weighs more than five of him - you’ve learned that he’s a leader of the rebellion, now, and it’s going better than the highbloods want everyone else to believe, and that a lot of your lowblood friends escaped with him. 

“I want you to come with me.”

“Come with- where? How?” It’s all you want to do, of course, but you can’t exactly walk in the room an interrogator and walk out a rebel. 

“We’ll figure that out along the way. It’s pretty much the first strategy of all rebels everywhere. Now, do you happen to have keys to these fucking things?”


	27. Healing

“Okay, let’s repeat that again for those in the cheap seats. Why the fuck am I standing next to a hospital bed to talk to you?” You cross your arms and scowl down at your idiotic best friend. 

“I was up and being a moron and I chased a cat down some stairs,” he mumbles, in the tone of a chatised toddler. You’ve been through this with him already - you’re just having a hard time understanding it. Believing it, sure - he’s gotten himself in more than a few asinine scrapes over the years. But comprehending?

“Okay, it’s not that part I’m not getting. What I can’t quite grasp is in which fucking universe that leads to falling down said stairs, bruising yourself purple, and then breaking your leg in three places? And then not even catching the cat in the end! Wow.” You catch yourself, remembering that you can’t be as livid as you want because then the nurses will be upset at you. 

“This one, apparently?” He makes sad puppy face at you. You are much too angry for sad puppy face. Okay, maybe only a little too angry. But that still comes out to “nope, not calming down, sit your ass down in that hospital bed and settle in for a good lecturing”. 

“Well then all the gods help me if that means I have to travel to another fucking dimension to find a Gamzee who doesn’t fall apart to pieces every time he so much as takes a step!” You pull up a stool with a grating screech and plunk down in it to deliver quality shouting while simultaneously resting. Multitasking!

“Aww, you know you motherfucking love me anyway.” His cat-ate-the-canary grin does not help your exasperation. It is also not adorable in any way, shape, or form. You tap him in the head with a fist. No concussion, miraculously, so you’re allowed to do that. 

“I’m starting to give that claim serious consideration,” you warn him, “because do you know what I thought when I woke up at five in the morning with a phone call from the hospital telling me my best friend is fucking hospitalized? If you guessed ‘oh, just Gamzee being Gamzee again, it’s all good’, you are fucking incorrect! If you guessed that I bolted out the door half asleep and was five minutes on my way until I remembered driving was a thing, then  _ding ding ding_! You get a whole heap of 'fuck you and fuck your timing and fuck your decision-making skills in particular’!" 

He hums, all false contemplation. "Not sure I’m all wanting that prize, brother. It ain’t sounding all that fun, to be motherfucking honest. Can’t we get our remember on of other fun times instead? Like that one time I was up and helping you find your keys, or like uh the time when we lounged at our living room something fierce and you weren’t mad as shit at me about anything. Yeah, let’s do that.”

“No, we can’t do that. Do you know why we can’t do that? It’s because you are here in a hospital wing, with your leg broken in three places, and do you know what that means I have to do?” You pause, but he’s smart enough not to try and answer. “It means I have to fill out a crapton of paperwork, and then phone in to work to tell them I’m not going today, and then try and find insurance and shit to pay the minumum of what is otherwise not a happy number on my bill!” You glower. 

“Well. Ah.” He’s having a hard time without his usual derailing tactic of draping himself all over you and snuggling until you cave in, since he’s not allowed to move his leg and doing that would make you angrier. “Did you ever get to finding that cat?”

You grudgingly admit that it’s not a terrible subject change, because despite the lack of subtlety it’s relevant, a good question, and still gives you the chance to rant all you want. “Right, and after all that you expect me to fetch your cat for you.”

He nods expectantly, and you sigh. Sometimes you regret letting him know you too well. You glance around for nurses, reach down for your backpack, and pull out a half-asleep feline. 

“You don’t get to hold it, though - you’re liable to try and run off after it if you don’t have a good enough hold on it, and I wouldn’t put it past you to forget you broke your leg.” You settle the cat on your lap and give him a smug look.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Credit to the “super awesome” Holly for most of the plot idea!)


	28. Learning

It’s about the third time when you’re stealing food out of the cat dish in his back yard that he starts getting suspicious. 

You’re usually careful about this kind of thing - you haven’t broken into anyone’s house yet, but it’s a close thing to say that. You’ve snuck hot dog buns out of backyard barbeques, apples from grocery stores, and the occasional sandwich from someone’s unattended bag. But recently you’ve made a useful discovery: this boy, Karkat Vantas, with both parents well-known softhearted cops, himself sorta-known as the grumpy little kid who talks loud or not at all - this rough-edged friendless boy leaves dinner leftovers out for stray cats. 

He watches from the back door sometimes, and it’s those times you let the cats have their fill and dart in as soon as he leaves to take what’s left. You’re his age, you think - somewhere in your teens. You like to imagine you could make friends with Karkat Vantas, if only you didn’t need him to be unaware of your existence so you can exploit this advantage a little longer. It’s risky enough his parents know you well. (They see you a lot, for fighting other kids on the streets, but the times you vanish before they get the chance to find you outnumber those encounters by far.)

You’ve learned a few things over time. Things like pretending you don’t exist so people don’t notice you too much, which leaves you openings to do your thing. You’ve learned that most people don’t give a shit you’re starving, especially if you’ve done wrong against them first - running is often the better option against apologizing. Telling people things isn’t a good idea, because they can sell you out later if they have good enough reason, and if the reason is food or money the police have plenty of that to hand out. 

So when Karkat Vantas starts hanging around long after the cats have left, squinting into the forest that encloses his yard, you don’t put any stock in those fantasies that he’ll forgive you and deign to befriend you. You start looking for other temporarily steady sources of food instead, and change up the times you visit his house so you won’t be caught in routine. 

Unfortunately, he’s more patient and clever than you gave him credit for, and that underestimation leads you to standing in the middle of his back yard, half a tuna sandwich clamped in your fingers and your spine hunched rigid in terror when he jumps up from where he’d been crouching (under the windowsill, in a darkened room, so you wouldn’t think he was there from looking in) and swings open the door to confront you. 

You need to run, you need to backpedal the fuck out of there and never come back, but instead you make this broken-up yelpwhimper and stare at him with wide, wide eyes. His anger melts into confusion, and then into something soft that you can’t identify. Beats pass with only the two of you standing there, and you’re almost not breathing and at the point where you’re hoping something will happen soon just to end the anticipation, even if it’s something terrible. 

“We have more sandwiches in the fridge,” is the first thing he tells you, and you still don’t move but this time from surprise. “I hate tuna, so you can have all of it if you want.” He’s not moving from his place in the doorway, so you peel your fingers out of the holes they dug into the sandwich and try to breathe.

“I. Thanks.” You’re not sure what to do here. This situation was never in any of your preparations, never in your worst-case scenario run-throughs. “Uh. I’m Gamzee.” Politeness, you think, is probably a good neutral ground. You can’t get in trouble for politeness. 

“I know,” he says, and that throws you off more. “Come in.” He turns and goes inside without even looking back to check you’re following, but the door is open and there is promise of food. You take step after tentative step, all your experiences screaming at you to take your chance to run, every foot closer a degree higher of danger. What if the door closes? What if his parents are home, ready to arrest you?

“What do you mean, you know?” You ask instead, and sidle nervously to stand just on the other side of the doorway. You press a hand against it, so it stays open. 

“My parents talk about you all the time,” he tells the inside of the fridge. “Says you’re some poor kid who has issues, keep wanting to help you but you’re far too clever for them by half.” He looks back, arms full of a dozen squashed sandwiches, and sees that you’re not moving. 

He brings them over to you instead, doesn’t say anything about how civilized people eat at tables, and you’ve lost track of how many unexpected things he’s done in the last ten minutes. One of your hands is still on the door, and the other is holding the tattered remains of the first cat-bitten sandwich - it’s been tormented enough over the past few stressful minutes that he doesn’t even bother offering it to you after he pries it out of your hand. He just hands you a fresh one and dumps the first into the trash. 

“Not even the cats would bother with that,” he says by way of explanation. You’re starting to think he won’t actually say anything you’re dreading, and a good number of things you’re not. 

“It’s nice to meet you,” you say, and you hope you’ll learn better things from him. 


	29. Time

The thing about the passage of time is that, if some god-like being or other really wants you to meet someone, there are enough convenient coincidences in the world to manage it even if you are the kind of surly asshole who couldn’t make a friend if his life depended on it.

It starts when you are eighteen, and at the music festival your school concert band goes to every year. You’re in between performances, with no one you particularly want to watch and half an hour until you go on. Baritone sax in hand, you carefully navigate the hallways in an attempt to find someplace you can set the damned thing down without being crushed in the flow of people trying to get from one area to another. It’s just when you spot a decent opening in the crowd, a nice direct path to an out-of-the-way corner, when some asshole completely takes you out with a trombone to the knees.

You go down and nearly get trampled, but Trombone Asshole saves you by way of being a visible hazard to public safety. (The trombone ends up fine, by the way - it’s still tucked safely away in a very sturdy case. It’s the backs of your knees that will remember this incident for weeks to come.)

What follows is a blur - he gives you a hand up; you screech at him about his absymal fucking manners and insult his face, his instrument, and his mother in alternating turns; he takes it all with a mildly bewildered serenely apologetic expression; you are only further enraged by the fact that it was a genuine unavoidable accident and you’ve made an idiot of yourself yelling in the middle of a crowded hallway. By the time you wind down, it’s five minutes until you need to be onstage, and you’re forced to hightail it out of there with heavy case in tow.

The next time you see him is two years later. You’re working part-time at some grocery store or other, and incredibly bored with working the cash register. A coworker comes by to swap, and you’re on your way to sort out shelves when you see him wander leisurely past the pineapples. You vaguely recognize Trombone Asshole, marvel briefly at coincidences and the size of the world and whatnot, and then continue on your way.

Five minutes later, you’ve made your way back to the fruits section, and you see him hanging aimlessly around the watermelons. Okay, you think. He’s just got some weird fondness for large fruits, no big deal. He shuffles off and you stay behind to deal with misplaced pears.

Seven minutes later, he’s back again. He doesn’t seem to have picked up any new items for purchase during his brief stint away from produce - in fact, he’s not carrying anything at all - and you have to wonder what the fuck his deal is. He’s off in another aisle by the time you think to ask him.

Half an hour after you first saw him, you’re forced to come to the realization that he’s most likely lost. How he can get lost in a store this size you don’t know - sure, the exit isn’t visible from here, but it will be just two aisles in that direction. You heave a weary sigh and walk up to him.

“Oh hey, you’re that tiny brother what was felled by my trombone.” He grins ear to ear upon seeing you, which is a reaction you fail to reciprocate.

“I’m only two inches shorter than you at most, asshole. Fuck you,” you add, as an afterthought.

“I’m Gamzee Makara, don’t think we were all up and introduced in that incident.” You grudgingly shake his offered hand.

“Karkat Vantas. But look, I’m not here for catching up or whatever.” What there is to catch up on when your only previous interaction was twenty solid minutes of ranting, though, you have no clue. “You’ve been wandering in and out of this same area for the past half hour now. Are you in need of assistance?” The last sentence was your pitiful attempt at professionalism and civility.

“Aw, yeah, that would be bitchtits. Just point me in the direction I can get my leaving on at?” You do so, and you’re inexplicatbly disappointed that the encounter ended right there.

Three minutes later, he’s back again. “Sorry, what were those directions all being? Got motherfucking turned around.” He scratches his head sheepishly.  
You sigh again, grab his elbow, and manhandle him to the door. He throws at least five different expressions of gratitude at you as he leaves.

It’s another three years before you see him again. The setting is a pub’s parking lot at two in the morning. You are sleep-deprived and unfortunately sober, because you were designated driver before your friends forgot they did that and all left without you in a taxi. You’re about to start on your way home when you decide to put the dinner leftovers in the back instead letting them leak grease onto the passenger seat.

It’s a good thing you do, too, because Trombone Asshole Gamzee Makara is passed out dead asleep in the trunk of your car.

After extricating your face from your hand, you shake him by the shoulder to wake him up. No way are you letting him inadverdantly kidnap himself with your car. He mumbles and shifts to get more comfortable. You shake him harder, and he comes awake all with a start, eyes flashing wide open and then squinting shut in a wince.

“Ah, fuck.” He looks up at you. “What the fuck?”

“You’re in my car. Get out.” It is way too early in the goddamned morning for this.

“Aw, shit.” He folds all his limbs out of your trunk and dumps himself right on the pavement at your feet. “Sorry, thought it was all being my own car.”

“S'fine. No harm done. Now shoo.”

You watch him stumble to a car two rows away and make sure he makes it into the trunk before you drive away.

A year later, you’re on a five-hour flight, and the guy sitting next to you with his hood up over his face is clenching his fingers around the armrests tight enough they creak, and also trembling a little in the shoulders. You try not to notice. He’ll probably be fine once the plane levels out after taking off.

And he is fine, until you hit a bit of turbulence. Then he makes a really quiet yelp and presses himself back into the seat like he’s trying to disappear, and you can’t help but touch him on the arm to ask what’s wrong.

It really shouldn’t surprise you that it’s Gamzee again. He looks at you with big terrified eyes, and by now it’s second nature to help him. You mutter hushed reassurances, distract him with bedtime stories until the turbulence passes, and he wraps you in long arms and refuses to let go.

You decide you’ll let him.


	30. Diamonds

You show up at his door one day, and he looks at you and asks you who you are, and it breaks you open. 

Well, more accurately he says “I’m tired as hell and giving you five fucking seconds to explain who the fuck you are, what you think you’re doing here, and why the hell you look,” and here he squints, slows down in his ranting, “kind of familiar… Were you at that party-thing a week ago?”

You say, “Karkat, brother, motherfucking  _missed you_  like breathing, like I missed smiling and the sea and -” You break off to take a breath, and what he actually said sinks in bit by bit. “Nnno,” you start, already counting down five minutes in your head even though you know him, he wouldn’t actually slam the door in your face (or you knew him, is more correct, but you don’t like that thought). “No, wasn’t at no party thing?”

He doesn’t care about the party thing anymore, though. “Whoa, hold up, that’s creepy as all hell?” And then he stops, scowls. “Do I know you from somewhere? Do you know me?”

Should’ve guessed he’d forgotten, the few others you’ve seen didn’t have any clue who you were or what happened, but you’d held out hope. “No, guess not. To that first one - second one’s being yes.” Your hands clench and unclench at your sides, curl the places where your claws are missing into your palm so it would bleed if your nails weren’t blunt, strange things. 

“… Come in.” He still has his skeptical face on, but he can’t deny some things aren’t adding up, and if there’s one good thing come out of those years you all twelve spent growing up, it’s that Karkat’s gotten a little slower diving into yelling rants and a little faster thinking. “Your time has been graciously extended to fifteen minutes.”

So you do, and he sits you down on a couch facing him and listens. You explain, about the game and about being trolls, before, and do your best not to dwell too long on your mentions of what the two of you had together. That was before. This, now, is helping him remember so he can do his leaderly thing and get everyone together, where they’re all meant to be and then you can go on and blend into the background like way way back in the oldest days. He doesn’t need you anymore, and you will pine but if he doesn’t remember - if he leaves you you’ll die, and you can’t pretend like you won’t. You can’t pretend you’ll be like a reasonable person and let him go, but maybe you can leave and pretend you never existed.

He seems to notice you tripping over that topic, anyway, breath hitching a little and fingers digging into the seat of the couch whenever you’re focused on not-mentioning it. When everything else that happened is described, when the explaining winds down twenty minutes over the time limit, he asks. 

“Did we have, like, a thing?” You bite your lip and nod. “A… weird alien thing.” He’s guessing; you nod again. “A weird alien romantic thing?” This is him confirming; another nod from you. 

He sighs and runs a hand through his hair. You should know better than to hope, but you do anyway. 

“So. Tell me how it went - how it goes.”

You stop breathing. 

-

You’re a week in, and not the greatest teacher, but you can tell his memory’s coming back in fragments and pieces - not even full scenes, he complains, just sometimes scents and sounds or some other random combination of senses - by the way he’s picking up on it quicker than you’d expected him to. Or that might be his natural inclination to quadrants showing. 

“Okay, review. Diamonds are a symbol, like hearts for us- for humans?” He’s sitting beside you, letting you lean into him and chewing on his sleeve with deep concentration. “And the main thing that holds it together is lowblood calms highblood down -”

“But you were always saying it’s up and supposed to be motherfucking all switched sometimes. To balance." 

"Right. Sounds like I agree with Past Me or whoever, otherwise this shit’s got unhealthy clusterfuck potential. I mean, you could do it the conventional way right, but then you’ve gotta watch out for all kinds of pitfalls and it isn’t good for one guy to hold himself and his partner together anyway.”

You smile, nod, wonder at the way his words come out just the same as that one aftermidnight at lunch, and how that last bit’s your own words to him tacked on. “A'right, brother, seems like you’ve got this motherfucking down more or less. Lesson for today’s being jams in pile or emergency situations, and how vocab’s got its lil obnoxious self all wedged into every motherfucking thing we do.”

“Sounds good." 

-

Pretty soon you figure out that sleeping together isn’t going to work as much but an occasional date activity, because as humans you aren’t all fitted up tight and together the right way, so sometimes you flail and wake him and sometimes he sleepmumble-shouts and wakes you. It’s stress all round and unnecessary struggles in a relationship that isn’t all the way patched together yet anyway. 

You get to shouting at each other about it. Your feet are too cold, he’s a blanket hog, you’re both tired from herding former friends and getting your lives together and sleep is precious and not a resource to be squandered. In the end, it’s a snapping jab from him that does it - he’s not the guy you knew, not yet or not ever, and fuck you for forgetting that - and fifteen minutes later he finds you punching holes in the bathroom wall and apologizes. 

You build up your own beds in the same room so you can get your middle-of-the-night cuddles on if both of you can’t sleep, but keeping to yourselves and giving each other space works out just fine in the end. 

-

When you get yourself worked up, angry enough to be violent, he can’t bring himself up all the way into calming you back down. He yells you down, sometimes, and it works but it isn’t the same. He tried papping and you nearly took his fingers off with your snarling teeth. 

When he gets himself worked up, crying into his knees at three in the morning, he won’t let you near him and you don’t know what you’re allowed to do. Eventually you get to settling on human-acceptable thing, lay a careful hand on his knee and make soothing empty noises that aren’t the hissing shhhhh but aren’t words either. 

You’re getting there, the two of you, and at least you can say you’re trying. 

-

One night neither of you are feeling well at all. You’re sniffly from a cold and he’s got a nasty headache coming on, and you had a diamonds lesson planned but it looks like you’ll have to postpone. But just as you’re shambling up to him to tell him this he takes you by the hand and pulls you into your room. 

He’s set up a little cozy blanketnest, not like the piles you tried before but still pretty dang comfortable-looking, and you give him a quizzical look. 

He pulls you down and wraps his arms around the back of your neck, presses his forehead to your collarbone in the palest gesture you’ve seen from him thus far, and explains: "We’re not trolls anymore, and even if I remember all the way we’ll never be trolls again. But seems to me like I was all for fucking remodeling the whole moirallegiance structure anyway, so what’s wrong with us figuring out pale as we go our own way?”

You can’t think of any way to argue with that fine bit of logic, so you don’t. “Pale for you, then, brother mine.”

“Pale for you, diamond.”


End file.
